My son always insists on subtitles being displayed because he’s a perfectionist about catching every bit of dialog. I used to find it distracting but just within the last year or so I’ve come to appreciate it more and more and now almost always have them turned on. It’s especially helpful when there are heavy accents or the dialog is muffled by extraneous noise in the film. It does detract from the theatrical experience but I’ve come to believe that it’s worth it.
Always. I think I process visual information much better than audio. For instance, if you tell me your name I’ll forget it, but if I read it I’ll probably remember.
Most of the time we use subtitles these days. At least when I watch with the Mrs. She’s got significant hearing loss requiring hearing aids, and the subtitles make things a lot easier for her.
I slightly prefer to not use them unless I’m personally having trouble understanding/parsing the audio. The one thing I don’t like about subtitles is how to usually arrive before the actual speech/action, and can act as a bit of a spoiler to the delivery of a good line or effect.
I have a degree of hearing loss from wearing headphones on the radio for several decades and playing music too loud. I use subtitles because if I don’t I lose parts of the dialog. The way movies and TV shows are mixed might contribute to the problem, but reading subtitles has become second nature to me and I would be lost without them.
We have them on all the time because my wife has a hearing impairment. Before fast subtitles became widely available, I was always explaining to her what an actor had said. This caused me to miss what the following lines of dialogue were! Anyway, subtitles are very important for hearing impaired folk.
A historical note: here in Australia, subtitles were first only available through the Teletext service, round about the 90s. One had to have a Teletext-capable TV; the subtitles were an option on a menu in that service. From memory, that option had to be selected each time. Then one went back to the broadcast program and the subtitles would creep across the bottom of the screen. Only a few programs were subtitled. Modern subtitles tend to be much quicker and don’t require the Teletext rigmarole.
Always. My hearing sucks. If there arent closed captions, I watch something else
All the time and have done for years. My hearing is fine but I keep the volume low while watching stuff on TV. My feeling has always been that the people sitting watching should be able to hear it without the need to subject people in other rooms to it. With modern mumbled acting styles and over loud background sounds/music it is easy to miss a word hear and there. Mind you I have always watched a lot of foreign films which necessitated becoming used to them.
For English language stuff I often don’t pay them any attention at all unless I miss something. I am amused by people that insist they couldn’t watch with subtitles on because reading them would distract them. I wonder whether their indiscriminate reading urge causes them to read every word on every sign that appears on screen during a broadcast.
The only problem is that comedies are not funny at all when captions are on, because the timing is always off.
I do this. I have no choice.
We had the opposite experience once. We were watching The Producers and got to the scene where Will Ferrell was doing his “Springtime for Hitler” dance on the rooftop.
Eventually, one of us turned to the other and said, “Why is Will Ferrell singing in French?” We kept watching, and then realised that all the dialogue was in French.
Somehow, we had turned it from the English setting to the French setting, without noticing for about 20 minutes.
Every time I visit my parents’ home, as my father has hearing loss, and the captions are always enabled on their TV sets.
At home: very rarely.
The British show I had a lot of trouble with was Ripper Street. Most of the actors were clear speaking and without difficult accents but something with the attempt at oldtimey language and cadence made it very hard for me to follow.
My son turned subtitles on in Netflix a couple of years ago and prefers it in both languages he watches shows in (English and French).
I’ve asked him a few times why, over the years. He says it helps him when people speak quickly, with accents, with learning/recognizing words he doesn’t know, and with spelling.
Kiddo is much wiser than I am, I think!
Yeah, pretty much. I guess it depends on how prominent, how legible, and how wordy the signs are, but if I’m looking at something with writing on it, reading it is pretty much automatic.
And if a sign appears prominently on screen, there’s a good chance it contains either meaningful information or a joke.
My father in law was hard of hearing (no hearing aids), but also only had one eye, so it was hard for him to read the captioning. So he’d just crank the volume way up. Which meant I’d have to turn my hearing aids way down, or else get blasted.
Two cases.
I watch a show Brokenwood Mysteries set in and filmed in New Zealand. I can’t follow what the heck they are saying half the time, even though I have heard a lot of Kiwis a lot of the time (I watch a lot of cricket and rugby).
And this is not English, but I can understand a certain continental language quite well, though I am hardly fluent. I can read it quite well, though I’d be hard pressed to compose a couple of paragraphs even. There is a show where the language is used but in a different dialect (c.f. Quebecois French vs Metropolitan French) and I can’t follow along without the captions. Note the captions are not in English, but seeing that foreign (to me) language written and spoken simultaneously helps a lot. Note that I can’t read fast enough either, so I’m mentally piecing together parts from both. It’s rather amazing to me that it works.
I’m losing hearing, so I’m sure I’ll be joining the population that needs captions for that reason as well. There are a bunch of shows where I can’t follow the dialogue completely, but mostly they are shows where I don’t care if I miss some.
I use sub titles if I can’t understand the dialog. Usually because the background music has become the foreground music. Sometimes because I have difficulty with an English or other accent.
I use subtitles when i watch on my subscriptions, but not when i watch on my husband’s, unless the dialogue isn’t in English.
I got in the habit when i used to watch TV with friends. My younger friends all use subtitles 100% of this time. Maybe it really is that modern mixing doesn’t work well with cheap speakers. But i realized that i do get more of the dialogue, or get it faster (and have more brain cells left over to think about the show) with subtitles on.
My hearing is slightly better than his, but he generally prefers not to use subtitles (unless he’s struggling to hear a particular show, then he’ll turn them on.) So he leaves it off by default in his settings, and i leave it on in mine.
Barely ever. I find them more distracting than helpful but my hearing is fine so I don’t really need them. The only exceptions are for programs with a lot of weird fantasy names that are hard to discern or tell apart or programs with really poor sound mixing that muddles the dialogue to the point where I have trouble.
We’ve watched all 8 (9?) seasons, and this was how we were at first. We adjusted though, and now we only miss a word or two — and usually it’s some slang we wouldn’t know anyway. Way back when the first All Creatures Great and Small series ran I had a terrible time with the actors who used a Yorkshire accent. Now, I can’t imagine not understanding it!