I find shorts subtitles horrible
To those reading this via RSS, this article contains CSS animation, so it’s advised to read it directly through the website for it to work.
READ SUBTITLES LIKE
THIS JUST BECAUSE
A VERTICAL SCREEN
CAN'T FIT LONG
SENTENCES EVEN THOUGH
FOR SOME REASON
THEY STILL WANT
TO USE WEIRDLY
LARGE TEXT JUST
TO KEEP AS
MUCH ATTENTION AS
POSSIBLE.
Well, you don’t have to imagine it here, because I’ve just made you go through what I have to suffer from1 when watching shorts that are cited in long-form YouTube videos. My apologies.
Notice the use of karaoke-style text animation in the example above, which is often seen in so-called ‘kids media’, but also a lot of shorts nowadays, whose contents are ironically clearly targeted towards adults. I find such subtitles so vexing and distracting!
Even in the name of accessibility (for, say, neurodivergent people), I don’t think it really holds, because I find it unlikely that accessibility is actually their intention, and even if was, I don’t think it helps much; it might even make things worse instead2.
Sadly, according to this article, this phenomenon seems to be a (rather unfortunate) consequence of a dropping trend of people’s attention span nowadays, no thanks to the popularity of vertical short videos:
“Our attention spans are so short now that I feel like closed captioning, and putting the captions up on the screen if closed captioning isn’t an option, is so crucial,” said McKay, 21, who lives in Portland, Ore.
Some may now ask, “What then do you think are considered good subtitles/captions?”
I’d say those that are produced by Caption+, which makes closed captions/subtitles (mostly) for YouTube videos. Examples can be found in videos in the YouTube channel Tom Scott plus.
-
I’ve even learnt to make a CSS animation, which I’d never known before, from scratch just to make that silly thing 😂!
I tried to make this animation infinitely loop but realised that the resulting code would be a nightmare if it’s to be purely in CSS (I’d have to define different
@keyframes, each with different timing percentage values, for all 37 words of the sentence…), so if you want to see it again, please refresh the page instead 😅. ↩︎ -
While this is mainly my personal opinion based on my own experience, there seems to be scientific research supporting this sentiment. To quote an interviewee with ADHD mentioned in this paper:
For Atlas, font and color changes to captions, similar to lyrics on karaoke videos, would
“cause more distraction… if they move [too quickly], if there’s too few words, or too many words at once, it’s counterproductive.” Lucy Jiang, Woojin Ko, Shirley Yuan, Tanisha Shende, and Shiri Azenkot. 2025. Shifting the Focus: Exploring Video Accessibility Strategies and Challenges for People with ADHD. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 561, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713637
In addition, to quote this article written by Meryl K. Evans, an accessibility marketing consultant:
↩︎Some apps will highlight the word spoken in a different color. It’s like karaoke, which is why I call them karaoke-style captions. This creates friction in the caption experience.