Deaf people’s experiences, attitudes and requirements of contextual subtitles: A two-country survey

Subtitles are text versions of the speech content of television and other audiovisual media. The paper discusses the results of a survey of deaf people1 in Poland and the UK on their experiences of, attitudes to and requirements for subtitles, including for the representation of emotions and contextual features. The results demonstrated the importance of subtitles, and that they considerably improved comprehension for the great majority of respondents. The overwhelming majority preferred verbatim subtitles, but attitudes to other suggested features were very varied, indicating the need for subtitle personalisation. This has not been considered previously and would now be feasible due to advances in technology.