I love them! I watch with subtitles whenever they are available. I wouldn’t say it’s a hearing loss problem exactly, but I have have some hearing issues with distinguishing dialogue from louder noises in the movie/show. Certain audio tracks seem disproportionally loud to me, often the soundtrack, when the volume is set to what seems normal to everyone else. I think I even started a thread about it here, asking if anyone else had this problem, and if memory serves, the general response was “yeah, that happens to some people.”
Subtitles were also a godsend when my daughter was a tiny baby. Small NYC apartment, she would go to sleep, and with subtitles we could watch TV the volume turned almost all the way down. Even other than the baby, I found this much more relaxing.
A lot of actors (hi, Marlon Brando!) seem to think it’s, I don’t know, dramatic or something to mumble. I don’t know that I would have understood half of what they say even before I had some hearing loss. Now, forget it. (Okay, maybe we aren’t SUPPOSED to hear it. But why have them say it at all?)
Also, movie directors often don’t make it easy to hear their actors talking. They have their actors talking under street noises, or talk while they’re walking away from the camera, or something. That’s realistic, but again, it’s hard for those of us who don’t have the hearing of a 10-yr-old to follow what’s being said.
[I’m always intrigued when a movie review complains that the movie is “stagey”–I think what that means is that the actors are speaking as if they were in a stage play, which is to say, to the audience. I consider it a virtue myself, but obviously there are plenty of others who disagree.]
So until and unless actors stop mumbling and directors decide to make it easy to hear the dialogue, I say subtitles all the way.