Enhancing Subtitle Features in Mobile Apps: Analyzing User Reviews for Accessibility and Usability Insights

Paper Title

Toward Enhancing Subtitle Features in Mobile Apps: Analyzing User Reviews for Accessibility and Usability Insights

Publication Info

• Topic area: Accessibility and usability of subtitle features in mobile applications.
• Keywords: Subtitles, accessibility, usability, mobile apps, user reviews, sentiment analysis, customization, multilingual support, accessibility challenges, HCI.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Despite the widespread use of subtitles, existing research often relies on controlled experiments, surveys, or interviews, which fail to capture real-world accessibility challenges and user frustrations. User reviews, a rich source of spontaneous feedback, remain underexplored in this domain.
• Significance: Subtitles are critical for accessibility, comprehension, and user experience, benefiting diverse audiences, including those with hearing impairments, language learners, and individuals in noisy environments. Addressing their limitations can significantly enhance inclusivity and usability in mobile apps.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research has examined subtitle design, accessibility, and user preferences but often in isolated or controlled settings. Studies on app reviews have highlighted their potential for uncovering usability issues, yet subtitle-specific accessibility in mobile apps remains unaddressed.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A large-scale analysis of user reviews from mobile apps to identify challenges, user expectations, and accessibility issues related to subtitle features.
• Novelty:
  1. Creation of one of the largest curated datasets on subtitle accessibility, comprising 48,872 user reviews.
  2. Thematic analysis identifying 30 fine-grained subtitle challenges, bridging usability and accessibility needs.
  3. Demonstration of user reviews as a low-cost, scalable resource for accessibility insights, extending formal HCI theories.
  4. Integration of accessibility theories (ABD, DSA, VSD) to interpret real-world subtitle failures and user frustrations.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  1. Extracted 179,519,598 reviews from 340 apps on the Google Play Store.
  2. Filtered reviews using keyword-based and manual coding to identify subtitle-related content.
  3. Categorized reviews into themes and sentiments, employing a taxonomy for user feedback.
  4. Conducted sentiment analysis and accessibility-focused thematic analysis.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • 61.63% of subtitle-related reviews were negative, with common issues including lack of subtitles (23.97%), text formatting (15.88%), and language support (11.62%).
  • Accessibility-related reviews (5.86% of the dataset) highlighted issues like auto subtitles (58.6%), voice control (25.8%), and keyboard shortcuts (25.9%).
  • Positive sentiment (27.42%) often praised subtitle accuracy, customization, and multilingual support.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Unlike prior studies, this work captures real-world, unsolicited feedback, revealing nuanced accessibility breakdowns and user frustrations.
  • Extends accessibility theories (ABD, DSA, VSD) with empirical evidence from large-scale user reviews.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Dataset: 48,872 subtitle-related reviews from 230 apps across diverse categories.
  • Metrics: Sentiment distribution, thematic prevalence, and accessibility challenges.
  • Methods: Manual coding, Fleiss’s Kappa for inter-rater reliability (0.84), and thematic saturation.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Dataset limited to Android apps and English-language reviews, potentially excluding non-English and iOS-specific insights.
  • Negative reviews may be overrepresented due to the nature of user feedback.
  • Future work could expand to non-English reviews and include iOS applications for broader generalizability.

Summary

This study analyzed 48,872 user reviews from 230 mobile apps to uncover challenges and expectations related to subtitle features. Key findings include widespread dissatisfaction with subtitle functionality, particularly regarding lack of subtitles, text formatting, and language support. Accessibility issues, such as auto subtitles and alternative input methods, were prominent. The study demonstrates the value of user reviews for identifying real-world accessibility barriers and extends HCI theories (ABD, DSA, VSD) with empirical evidence. Developers are urged to prioritize customization, multilingual support, and cross-device compatibility to enhance subtitle accessibility and usability.