In my recent adventures into indie animated series on YouTube, I've found some of them have had someone—presumably a fan or a staff member—go to the effort of manually adding closed captions to the video. Which is great! Since the automated captions on YouTube are still pretty garbage.
(Why do the automated captions display words one-by-one instead of just printing out the maximum amount that can fill two lines?)
Only problem is that the captions I've seen are pretty amateur. That isn't to discount the work that went into writing and timing them, and they even went to the effort of including audio descriptions for a deaf audience. The issue lies in improper formatting and some sloppy presentation.
So, let's go down some of the common and less-common fumbles. I mainly operate on something approaching the official Netflix subtitle style guide, but I've also been doing this off-and-on for about 10-ish years.
Oh yeah, there was another odd one that I'd forgotten about that's mainly a Netflix thing but I've also seen elsewhere. Some high-effort captions will attempt to move out of the way when important visual information (such as a character saying something) occupies that part of the screen.
This one I'm neutral on, since I'd rather that they stay rooted in one consistent place, but ideally an assistive feature also shouldn't be occluding the actual work that it's for. It goes into the box of well-considered presentation choices where you weigh the value of what it offers.
At my last job, I did an accessibility report on the extreme inconsistency when it comes to videogame subtitles in recent titles, and it beggars belief that so little consideration goes into them compared to graphical bells and whistles that are maybe 1% as important as good captions are. I might try to take what I found from that research and write about it here, too.
I was a professional subtitle editor for almost 10 years, definitely agree with most of these! Regarding lower thirds, I’ve always been of the opinion that you should only move them when they actively overlap with the text, unless it’s a situation where that text looks REALLY similar to a subtitle. But no corporate style guide in the world agrees with me on this, so lower third on-screen text = UP YOU GO
As a little piece of trivia, at least at the places I worked most of us HATED the modern Netflix style guide when it came out. We thought it was basically sacrilege to start a subtitle immediately on the new shot change instead of chaining them around the shot changes. I think over time we all accepted that Netflix was probably right about this, though, and a lot of other companies adopted their style.
I loathed working for Netflix only slightly less than working for Disney but they’ve gotten the quality bar pretty high with their subs. If you go back and watch some of the old Netflix subs from before they standardized, you can see how hellacious they are. Check out Gossip Girl, if they haven’t fixed them yet— an acquaintance of mine did those while tweaked of his gourd and it is a running joke in our friend group how horrifically inaccurate they are. This brings me to my next fun fact which is that adderall and meth use is absolutely rife among subtitle editors, especially the overworked entry-level transcribers and those who work night shifts. I got into them during that time and definitely used my fair share of each both on and off the clock before I cleaned up.
Finally, if you want to work as a subtitler, I’m sorry to say you should almost certainly find something else to do. The pay was great back in the 90s but has collapsed since then. It was barely workable during my time but at this point you are going to be busting your ass for pennies unless you live in a country where USD goes a very long way or you live at home and are just looking to make a little pocket money without working retail or food service. The trade has sadly been totally deskilled, and although AI still lacks the contextual chops to make really good subs companies are forging ahead with it anyway and quality be damned.
Thank you for listening to my rambles. I may add on funny or awful experiences from my former career as I remember them.