When your cinema has no captioned screenings

The problem with the captioned showing

Where captioned screenings exist, they are usually one showing a week, often on a weekday afternoon, and often weeks into a film's run. That is not access to cinema. It is access to one seat at one time, and it means never going to a film on the night it opens, or on the night your friends are going.

Closed-caption devices are the other answer on offer: a cup holder screen or a pair of glasses collected from the box office. When they work they work well. They are also frequently out of charge, out of stock, tuned to the wrong auditorium, or simply not available at the cinema you want to visit.

Bringing your own instead

A subtitle file for almost any released film already exists. If you can play it on the phone in your hand, the screening you attend stops mattering: any showing, any cinema, any seat.

That is the whole idea. You load an .srt or .vtt file, press play when the first line of dialogue lands, and read from your lap. You keep the timing in your own hands, so when it slips you fix it rather than waiting for someone else to.

What it is not

It does not listen to the film and it does not generate captions. There is no microphone and no speech recognition, because a phone microphone in a cinema hears the room, and a caption that is confidently wrong is worse than none. You supply the file; the app is a player and a clock.

It also cannot help with a film that has no subtitle file anywhere, or with a cut whose runtime does not match any file you can find. Both are rare for anything on general release.

Reading without lighting the room

The dark room is the constraint the whole design answers to. Text is white on black, the controls fade out once playback starts, and nothing on screen is bright enough to reach the row behind you. Turn your brightness most of the way down before the film starts and hold the phone low.

The typeface is Atkinson Hyperlegible, drawn for the Braille Institute to keep similar letterforms apart at a glance. That matters when you are reading one line and looking straight back up at the screen.

Getting set up before you go

• Find your subtitle file at home, on wifi, not in the queue.
• Check the runtime matches the cut being screened.
• Open the file in the app once, so it is loaded and the app is cached.
• Turn brightness down and put the phone in do not disturb.
• Press play on the first line of dialogue, not on the studio logos.

Once the page has loaded it runs with no signal, which is what you want in a basement auditorium with no bars.

Read next

• How Subtitlezz works, step by step
• When the film is in a language you don't read
• Cinema subtitle apps, compared honestly