Regardless of what streaming service I might use, I don’t hit play on a movie or TV show until I’ve enabled subtitles, even if I understand the language.
It’s not just that I suffer from mild hearing loss. Volume settings and the actual audio quality of some titles get in the way of hearing what the characters are saying. The dialogue is extremely important, and I don’t want to keep rewinding to figure out what they said.
That means I’m just like about fifty percent of Americans who watch content with subtitles most of the time, a statistic that Netflix quoted in its newest feature announcement. The streamer just introduced a new subtitle option that many people will appreciate, including me.
Netflix will start showing dialogue-only subtitle options on some shows. This will probably replace the current captioning option most of us use, which covers all the sounds in a movie or TV show, not just the lines spoken by the characters.
Netflix currently supports Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (SDH/CC) for most titles. These cover everything you might hear, including descriptions of music and ambient sounds. You’d get audio cues like [phone buzzing] or [dramatic music swells], as well as the names of the people speaking.
Those are useful cues for people suffering from significant hearing issues. The audio descriptions allow them to get a better understanding of what’s happening in a movie. That’s important when a character reacts to a sound the viewer can’t actually hear.
Most people don’t need the extra audio cues in their subtitles, and that’s what Netflix is fixing. However, Netflix can’t offer the feature on all the movies and TV shows available in its catalog. Instead, it’ll start with Netflix originals like season 5 of You and then make its way to other titles.
To use dialogue-only subtitles on Netflix, you’ll want to open the language picker when watching a show like You season 5 and look for the new subtitles options. You’ll see two options for English, as seen above. The English choice shows only subtitles for spoken dialogue. Pick English (CC) if you need the audio cues.
As the screenshot above shows, the dialogue-only subtitles are coming to other languages, not just English. You’ll have to look for the same distinctions between the same-language subtitles as above.
Netflix says the new subtitles will be available on all new originals in every language they offer, in addition to SDH/CC. Hopefully, dialogue-only subtitles are coming to more movies and TV shows, not just originals.
I’ll also remind you that Netflix recently added subtitle customization options for the TV app, which let you set the size, style, and color of subtitles.
Netflix rolled out a great new subtitles option for streaming shows: You can now select dialogue-only subtitles for originals.
