All about fonts for captioning and subtitling
Screenfont.ca is part of an upcoming project to research and develop a set of standards for captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing.
Screenfonts are important because, in captioning and subtitling, our instrument is typography.
We’re creating visible words that we expect people to read and understand almost instantaneously before the words disappear. Font quality becomes – and already is – an issue. It may surprise you to learn that there are no screenfonts in existence that:
* provide a wide enough range of styles and variations to be useful in real-world captioning and subtitling applications (believe it or not, a single sansserif will not work for everything)
* are specifically designed to be read from screens within the constraints of captions and subtitles (like scrolling, crawling, appearing and disappearing, all while typeset against unpredictable backgrounds)
* are customized, where necessary, for specific technologies (e.g., analogue television, HDTV, computers, offscreen displays)
* and, most importantly, have been tested with nondisabled, deaf/hard-of-hearing, and visually-impaired subjects
Screenfont.ca: All about fonts for captioning and subtitling