That’s either “sign language doesn’t work with our speech-to-text algorithm and we’ll be throat fucked if we hire an actual person to do a job” or some massively pretentious statement about accessibility in media.
What pisses me off about subtitles is when they start displaying lyrics to songs playing in the background.
I don’t mind stuff like that when it’s at the top of the screen like a fansub
Although I love it when they subtitle the inaudible-but-foreshadowing news anchor in the background.
SDH subtitles (subtitles for the deaf & hard of hearing) describe all the relevant sounds in a scene including background song lyrics, there is likely to be another plain subtitle track if you don’t want that
Oh if only. I’ve seen two tracks on occasion on streaming services but it’s extremely rare. I think it was on Netflix or Prime and it’s been years since I’ve seen it. As someone who is not hard of hearing but just has a little trouble understanding sometimes it’s very useful to have the option that’s exclusively dialogue.
Or there’s no lyrics but the subtitles keep repeating “heat” or “scary”.
I’ve not had scary yet, but heat does come up a lot for me in autogenerated subs when it can’t figure out wtf is going on.
Gentle backing music:
Subtitles: Heat
That’s hilarious.
If the song lyrics are relevant to the scene, sure I could see them being there. Like those songs that are custom written to do a sort of 4th wall breaking live commentary on the characters. But a lot of songs? Not needed at all.
The worst is when you’re watching something with subtitles (in your own language because it’s hard to hear sometimes), then someone on screen speaks a different language with the subtitles hardcoded into the video.
Great, right?
Well no, because Amazon’s (or Netflix etc, they all do it) subtitles have a big “[Speaks German]” up the entire time, blocking the hard coded subs entirely so you cannot see what they say without temporarily disabling subs. Like bitch, I KNOW THEY ARE SPEAKING GERMAN, MOVE THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY SO I KNOW WHAT THEY’RE SAYING
It’s so fucking stupid and infuriating. How have they not addressed this shit?
Sometimes for fun I’ll watch it foreign language movie I’ll turn on English dubbing and run subtitles as well. It’s really hilarious how different the two will be
Oh I hate that. Netflix animes are super bad about it. I wish they’d have the subbed English dub as well instead of a translated sub.
I get a special kind of mad when I watch a foreign film in its original language. Turn on that language’s subtitles and the subtitles don’t match what’s being verbally said because apparently the subs have been translated into English then back into the original language so nothing matches and everything sucks. Or worse when they’ve translated some idiom for American audiences and have translated that idiom back so what’s being said makes zero sense.
This is an accessibility issue and the FCC takes it pretty seriously. Captions must be accurate, complete, synchronized (or as close to as possible), and (this is the important one in this case) cannot obscure important information on the screen.
It’s a pretty easy form, but they do want a lot of details.
https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=36040
Yeah I remember Man in the High Castle was really terrible with subtitles. It didn’t have hard-coded subtitles at all and the programmatic ones didn’t work reliably. So I’d be sitting there and and thinking “ok am I not supposed to know what they’re saying?” After the scene goes on for a while it becomes “yeah I definitely supposed to know what they’re saying well I guess I have to mess with subtitle settings.” Sometimes it wouldn’t work at all and I’d have to open a ticket with Amazon Prime and wait until they got it working.
So I guess they gave up on fixing subtitles and just baked them in. But still fucked it up anyway. Apparently a company as big as Amazon still can’t do QA on the use case of someone who’s an english speaker just watching on their platform. It’s sad.
It happens on Jellyfin too but probably because the subs and videos are pulled from the same source
I mean if you have a better way to make viewers understand what people with hearing impairments go through every day, then I’m all ears.
Phrasing.
Yeah, dont piss away Millions of dollars on a movie noone will watch. Nobody fucking cares what struggles anyone goes thru. You wanna make fuckin movie for every type of cancer victem, diabetic, or retard who lost an arm or leg?
I’m always surprised by how stupid people can get.
Congrats!
Have you seen the trash currently being turned out? What could it hurt? Tell someone elses story, maybe it’ll be entertaining.
Yeah, god forbid you might gain a new perspective and develop *gag* empathy for people that live different lives or have different problems than you do
MAGA film criticism.
The literally is a movie about people suffering from cancer. And one about somebody who’s lost a limb. I’m surprised someone as clearly educated in the film arts as you doesn’t know that.
Guy whos never watched movies or felt empathy:
Wow.
🤣
Then there are the shows too cheap to make real subtitles and instead use auto generated ones that can’t handle accents or names.
I see this more and more with shit on streaming services where, for some fucking reason, they strip the subtitles out for the non-native language parts even tho they are supposed to be subtitled for the audience. Like for example I wanted to see the new Ghostbusters the other day since it was on HBO which I have, but half-way through I had to stop it and pirate it anyway, because all the scenes with just the bad guys talking was supposed to be subtitled but they took the god damn subs out. They didn’t even translate the dialogue in closed captioning even tho the audience is supposed to know what they are saying!
My favorite is when services will put a caption like “[speaking spanish]” over top of the English subtitles that are in a film for a Spanish speaking character.
The film maker put the subtitles in there so if you can’t speak Spanish you can understand what the character is saying and then you can’t read it because Amazon decided to helpfully inform you they are speaking.
I was watching rental family (an american guy moves to japan to be an actor and speaks a very little japanese) and somehow they decided to ignore all the parts in japanese and from the subtitles there was only the english parts. In the beginning i was like "ok, it’s to let the audience know that the protagonist does not understand what they’re shouting to him - then finally i had to pirate a sub from opensubtitles to understand was going on as the dialogues were 95% in japanese
I am a bit lost here.
I just watched A Quiet Place on Amazon and it had subtitles…
Subtitles also describe sounds, they’re not just about speech.
You’re thinking of closed captioning. Subtitles is just dialogue.
That is Subtitles for the Deaf and Hearing-impaired (SDH). It is not the standard for subtitles in the US and Canada.
That is called described audio.
Well, ackshually…
No info about film in thread: mildy infuriating.
It’s from Lollywood, you’ve probably never heard of it.
U haven’t seen that movie?
A quiet placeU have seen this one?
I cri evere tim
Failed to Load Media makes my favorite videos
No. What’s that? It looks sad
I believe it’s called The Rural Juror
The… Rurrershurr?
No Rrrrrrewwrjerrr
They Turk er Jurrr.
The best days of my flerm…
For a decade tech has fucked sub’s accessibility. The landscape is a complete mess, simultaneously stuck with tech that is too old and also suffering from awful implementation of new tech (LLMs suck at closed captioning but everyone insist it is the only way to do it now). Yet context reading to know who needs subs when is still so archaic and depends completely on user input. But then, the content is always innadecuate, specially when it’s for the hearing impaired.
Yeah I’ve noticed a lot of llm subs on streaming platforms and I’m like bro wtf the stuff you download is better than this. How can you be the one making the thing and not put accurate fucking subtitles on it. It’s pathetic. I mean are have the llm do the heavy lifting but you’ve still gotta proof it ffs.
Sometimes, and specifically on Amazon prime, if a show / movie has hard coded subs (for sign or other foreign languages) you will need to turn off the optional subtitle setting.
Of course then, when someone does speak out loud you won’t get your normal subs until you turn the setting back on. I used to put in a new complaint for each show that it happened on until i canned prime altogether and went back to pirating all their content.
Germany adds the funky police that sometimes only German subtitles are allowed no matter the audio language you pick. So if there are no German-language subtitles because none were ever made, well you’re shit out of luck now, fuck you and your subtitle needs! 😐
Its really weird that they do that. Like I would have assumed that the hardcoded subs were part of the video.
🫵🤏🤞🤞🤘☝️👍🤌👍🤞🤌🫱🫲🫷👉👐🫶🙌🫶🤛
Directions unclear, stealing third base
⬆️⬆️⬇️⬇️⬅️➡️⬅️➡️🅱️🅰️ [START]
Great band!
The Konami Code?
This made me curious how many words in ASL (and other sign languages) can be made just using the hand emojis. 🤔
afaik 🤟 is the only emoji based off an ASL sign so I don’t think there’s many
deleted by creator
Not many.
Is that Jim from The Office!?
Yeah season 21 is crazy, they took a hard sci fi turn about 10 seasons ago and now everyone is split up. They made a whole cinematic universe and its very confusing. Jim was a CIA agent for a while and now he’s a post apocalyptic survivor. IMO they’re making the character do too much, bir I guess that’s what happens when you run out of ideas ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
CIA Jim, yes
Didn’t he also play CIA Agent Jack Ryan?
He does a good job of it
He couldn’t stay in Athlead forever.
I want there to be a film with both Tim and Jim sitting at a desk pulling reaction faces to camera at everything going on.
Who’s Tim?
Original Jim from the UK version of The Office
I believe his name is Bilbo Watson
Big reaction face guy.
This film would never work for second screen viewers because the characters would have to nonstop be saying “I’m being really quiet” or “we can’t make any noise, even loud breathing, or the monster will get us”.
That’s not going to work for me. I can’t read. Can they do a dub?
That’s called audio description, they do it for blind audiences.
My Dad is incredibly dyslexic, and it’s a legit issue for him.
Growing up, if a movie or TV show had subs we had to take turns reading it out loud for him. I still have to catch myself trying to do automatically it when we’re watching something with other people.
I grew up in a country where movies are rarely dubbed. I was reading the subtitles out loud for my siblings who couldn’t read yet for entire movies.
I read video game dialogue out loud for kids like a storybook. Also anime subs that have no official dub, it can get pretty silly
Do you do make voices too for each character? XD
why would you not?
I would 100%
Of course lol. I try and copy the Japanese voice actors
That’s so cute
if a movie or TV show had subs we had to take turns reading it out loud
I do this for my wife, because she spends most of a film on her phone.
She’s listening to the audio and can mostly follow what’s going on by glancing at the screen and reading subtitles every now and then, but if there’s a foreign language with subtitles, or a text description (Paris, 11 AM or 10 years later, etc.), she’ll miss it and then be completely lost.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to pause a movie and give a quick recap to get her caught up with the plot.
I believe Netflix order movies to be understandable to people who are not paying attention. Maybe they have something that is good enough for you, it would save you from having to recap stuff.
Second Screen Viewing, yeah. Basically, Netflix is dumbing down their scripts so people can understand the plot even when it’s just playing on their second screen while they do other stuff. Apparently our attention spans have shrunk so much that people can’t even be expected to pay attention to the movies they put on.
Yeah. Fuck all that shit.
I’m living in the “how it happened” stages of Idiocracy. What the fuck is this timeline?!
I am conflicted here. On the one hand, I agree that subtitles would have been nice. On the other hand, I think folks with hearing disabilities get shut out of other content so much that I don’t think this somewhat solitary case makes it good mildly infuriating material. It’s most likely just an oversight. Much less likely a clever scheme to highlight ableism.
On the one hand
heh
Eff me, that wasn’t intended!
I mean, by US law (back when analog TV was standard) all TV broadcasts had to include closed captions on scanline 23(?) for people with hearing disabilities. it was part of the vertical blanking interval so it didn’t interfere with the regularly visible broadcast. It is good to include subtitles for all dialogue, spoken in the local dialect, in a foreign dialect, and even the various sign languages. That’s isn’t to say that yes, I fully agree that differently abled people should be able to take part in the dialog and should have accommodations where needed.
Semi related, did you know American sign language is closer to French sign language than it is to British sign language?
Yes, I did hear that before.
