Whether or not you use subtitles while playing games, odds are that you think of them as a pretty simple aspect for developers to handle. In fact, there are all sorts of way to go wrong.
Over on Gamasutra, Ian Hamilton has written an article all about subtitles and closed captioning. While it’s geared toward developers, it still makes for interesting reading. I almost always have subtitles enabled because I invariably miss a piece of dialogue, and yet it had never occurred to me how many things there are to take into consideration when designing them.
While Hamilton condenses the basics down to things like having a high contrast between text and background, using a large font, and not throwing too much text at players at once, he also goes over quite a few other things. These include ensuring subtitles can be turned on before anything might be missed in-game and offering some way to distinguish between speakers.
Keep in mind that subtitles (and closed captions) are useful not just for those who don’t want to miss anything, but can be essential for players with disabilities.
The full blog is worth checking out, if only for the image comparisons of games that do or do not handle subtitles well. Above, you can see how Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and Portal 2 each handle this, with Black Flag’s text becoming unreadable in certain situations.
Do you use subtitles while playing games? Let us know in the comments below.
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