This is in the context of Stranger Things, but no spoilers whatsoever.

So Stranger Things made headlines in past years for its thorough and sometimes gross-out closed captions.

I've been watching S5 and haven't seen any of that. Not only that, but no other cues like "[door slams]" or "[gasps]" or "[haunting choral music]."

Apparently, Netflix started rolling out a "feature" last Spring that in shows going forward, choosing "English" subtitles shows only the dialogue. You have to pick "English [CC]" to get the audio cues as well.

I'm honestly not sure who is served by the former who wouldn't be at least as well served by the latter. But the fuckers seem to have defaulted things to the one without audio cues--i.e., the least accessible thing they could have done. As well as undercutting and concealing the hard work of the sound designers.

Fuck the hard-of-hearing, I guess.

#accessibility #ClosedCaptions #subtitles #Netflix #SoundDesign #StrangerThings #EverydayAbleism

Ars Technica: Google temporarily disabled YouTube’s advanced captions without warning. “Google has now posted a brief statement and confirmed to Ars that it has not ended support for SRV3. However, all is not well. The company says it has temporarily limited the serving of SRV3 caption files because they may break playback for some users.”

Any of you know your way around android APK files?

I have a really weird, very specific modification I'd like to have done to a file, it SHOULD be really simple, but I know basically nothing about this sort of thing.

Spectrum (the Cable TV provider) refuses to release a version of their app for Google/Android TVs. A couple of years ago, someone made an APK that opens "a simple webview that launches the spectrum website to watch live tv." They also routed the basic controls through the TV remote.

It works great... but the one problem I constantly run into is that there's no way to turn Closed Captions on.

The project is on Github - https://github.com/dyay108/SpectrumTV_webview - but hasn't been updated in years and presumably won't need it as long as Spectrum has a web page where you can watch all your cable TV channels. I reached out to the creator asking if there was a way to make a CC-always-on version of it for those that want it that way, but haven't heard back.

#ClosedCaptions #Android

Last week I solved an interesting problem - how to get English subtitles working from a Star Trek DVD.

Short answer: it had no English subtitles, but had Closed Captions info in its analog video stream. So it was a matter of making the DVD player to spit the CC out and the TV to ingest and display CC.

https://codeyarns.com/tech/2026-01-01-the-curious-case-of-the-missing-english-subtitles.html

#closedcaptions #subtitles #dvd

Question for nerds and video watchers: are the closed captions available in this (you may have to enable them)?

https://m.earth.org.uk/smart-radiator-valves-talk-20201112.html

#CORS #VTT #ClosedCaptions

This week, Google introduced "Expressive Captions on Android, a new feature within Live Caption that will not only tell you what someone says, but how they say it."

#ClosedCaptions #DisabilityAid

https://mobilesyrup.com/2025/12/03/youtube-expressive-captions-rollout/

@WeirdWriter

This is about hearing loss not vision, but:

A couple years ago, HBO Max ran a Batman "radio drama." The visual was static: old-time radio and background.

And they had closed captions to accommodate hearing impairment.

So far, so good.

But the captions didn't note who was speaking.

Typically in my experience, CCs usually don't tag the speaker if you can see the speaker's mouth moving, but do otherwise.

So these CCs help the hearing-impaired if and only if the person with impaired hearing could recognize the voices with no visual cues.

I made it about 20 minutes.

They came so close...

#HBOMax #accessibility #ClosedCaptions #AccessibilityFailure