Subtitles - where World-Readiness and Accessibility both make themselves at home

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2013/08/19 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2013/08/19/10442592.aspx

I want to start by saying that I love my Surface RT and my ex-girlfriend loves the one I gave her. They are awesome and useful and every day I learn more about what they can do. Especially with the power of the applications in the App store.

And not just the Microsoft ones. The third party apps have extended the platform for not just the Surface - in Windows 8 (and soon Windows 8.1!) the game has been changed in ways that I doubt anyone fully understood at the time.

Remember that whole 'Windows 7 was my idea' stuff? Well it came true even more, since the people writing apps and putting them in the store *are* building Windows now.

I also love my Windows Phone 8. Most of mail is read there and written there. In fact, this very blog you are reading is being written on my phone.

It is a wonderful story about how even when Microsoft doesn't deliver, a third party can save the day with a free, and ad-free app!

Where our story begins is the SRT file extension (the link is to the Wikipedia article on the SubRip text files that are pretty much universally used to support both translation to other languages and captioning for the deaf. As it says in the article:

Now I fell in love with turning on the captions during that weird time when my flat screen blew, but I still do it to this day.

So imagine my surprise when I find my shiny Nokia Lumia 920 running Windows Phone 8 wasn't supporting captions!

Thankfully, a developer named Luis Fonseca created a free App called Subtitles Display which allow any video with an .SRT file next to it do what Windows Media Player and pretty much everyone else has been doing since 1.0, even if the WP folks were to busy! 😒:-(

I am not a manager over there, but they could do worse than bringing Luis in for an interview loop. Or at least cutting a check to say THANK YOU for the assistance!

You'll be seeing an app or two coming from me, too. I want in on this brave new world where people have the opportunity to build Windows and Windows Phone based on our ideas. I won't build a new Outlook or anything, but an MSKLC update or two or three would be quite nice!

Any “external subtitles display” (the poor grammar is telling) is a complete failure and a nonstarter. Also, captions are not subtitles.

Although the description of the App doesn't say it, simply HAVING the App installed lets the .SRT file work properly running any video.

For the other, if I have five files, each in a different language, for the same movie (assume one of them is for the same language as the movie is already in), then the lines get blurred a bit...

> Who's with me?!?

I might join when I manage to forgive WinPhone for being the cause behind ClearType's disappearance from the desktop versions of Excel/Word. I feel so betrayed, and I know whose fault it is. Yes, WinPhone. It's your fault.

I can't see this happening until all of my desktop monitors are 250+ dpi, so... this will take a while.

@Roman:

WinPhone? What does it have to do with Cleartype ine Office on desktop?

(IIRC WinPhone uses ClearType itself for text.)

Please consider a donation to keep this archive running, maintained and free of advertising.
Donate €20 or more to receive an offline copy of the whole archive including all images.