Why no dialog-only subtitles?

I'm an English learner, and I like to have subtitles to aid my hearing comprehension in movies and series.

In both Netflix and Amazon Prime, I often (always?) have a single option for English subtitles, which are closed captions ("English [CC]"). These includes descriptions of sounds and music that make the experience less enjoyable for me, e.g. "[Omnious music]". I can't possibly be the only one, one of my favorite cartoonists mocked it [1].

I wouldn't doubt that those descriptions are actually preferred by deaf people, but I'd like an alternative for myself.

Before streaming services, I barely knew this problem. Cable TV happily gave me dialog-only subtitles.

What puzzles me is, making dialogue-only subtitles from the closed captions they already have should be extremely cheap. A dumb bot removing everything that has brackets would do a flawless job almost all the time.

So why don't they do it, as a selectable option?

[1]: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/subtitles

solardev · a year ago

There's no market forces or accessibility requirements that incentivizes them to do both. For what it's worth, I think it depends on the particular movie/show (as opposed to the platform) whether they have both closed captions and regular subtitles. Some media will have both, but it's cheaper to just make one set (closed captions) that everybody can see.

As an alternative, maybe you can just find unofficial subtitles on opensubtitles.org and then overlay them using special display software, instead of using the built-in ones from the streaming providers.

Bowes-Lyon · a year ago

Maybe because they are too big to care?