If you have watched anything on Netflix with the subtitles on within the last couple of years, especially the platform’s most famous show, Stranger Things, there is a good chance you have noticed the purposeful descriptive closed captions. Descriptions like “sibilant trilling,” “dissonant gibbering,” and “eldritch thrumming” were among the captions that went viral in 2022 when season 4 of Stranger Things was released. However, no matter how much traction they gained, Netflix is now letting users have the option to disable those specific audio inscriptions for the upcoming releases. 

With the release of You season 5 last week on April 24th, Netflix first implemented this brand-new alternative: “original language subtitles that show only the spoken dialogue, without the descriptive audio cues.” Users select their preferred audio language and then receive two options for the subtitles; for example, “English” will show only the dialogue spoken by the characters, and “English (CC)” shows both audio descriptions and dialogue. Netflix confirms that these new subtitle choices will be accessible in every offered language on any upcoming Netflix originals, including titles like Stranger Things season 5 and Happy Gilmore 2. 

In 2022 at Netflix’s Tudum, English SDH (Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing) subtitler Jeff T. spoke on the topic of Stranger Things’ excessive audio inscriptions, stating that for the horror genre, “sound design is so crucial,” so they “wanted to try to accurately reflect that in our subtitles for the Deaf and hard of hearing because this is their primary avenue for access to those sensory inputs.” English SDH quality checker Karli Webster elaborated that it was all the levels of hearing loss that made those captions that users see now so descriptive. Webster stated that they had “to strike a balance between descriptors that will describe something well for someone who’s never heard or that will recall an emotion or a feeling for the hard of hearing audience that they did feel perhaps when they were able to hear music.”