Online news videos: the UX of subtitle position.

Crabb, Michael; Jones, Rhianne; Armstrong, Mike; Hughes, Chris J.

Abstract

Millions of people rely on subtitles when watching video content. The current change in media viewing behaviour involving computers has resulted in a large proportion of people turning to online sources as opposed to regular television for news information. This work analyses the user experience of viewing subtitled news videos presented as part of a web page. A lab-based user experiment was carried out with frequent subtitle users, focusing on determining whether changes in video dimension and subtitle location could affect the user experience attached to viewing subtitled content. A significant improvement in user experience was seen when changing the subtitle location from the standard position of within a video at the bottom to below the video clip. Additionally, participants responded positively when given the ability to change the position of subtitles in real time, allowing for a more personalised viewing experience. This recommendation for an alternative subtitle positioning that can be controlled by the user is unlike current subtitling practice. It provides evidence that further user-based research examining subtitle usage outside of the traditional television interface is required.

Citation

CRABB, M., JONES, R., ARMSTRONG, M. and HUGHES, C.J. 2015. Online news videos: the UX of subtitle position. In Proceedings of the 17th International Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGACCESS conference on computers and accessibility (ASSETS '15), 26-28 October 2015, Lisbon, Portugal. New York: ACM [online], pages 215-222. Available from: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2700648.2809866

• Conference Name: 17th International ACM SIGACCESS conference on computers and accessibility
• Conference Location: Lisbon, Portugal
• Start Date: Oct 26, 2015
• End Date: Oct 28, 2015
• Acceptance Date: Jun 18, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Oct 28, 2015
• Publication Date: Oct 31, 2015
• Deposit Date: Sep 19, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 19, 2016
• Publisher: ACM Association for Computing Machinery
• Pages: 215-222
• ISBN: 9781450334006
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2700648.2809866
• Keywords: Laboratory experiment; Subtitles; Experiment methodology; User experience
• Public URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10059/1753