On-Screen Text and Subtitles: Why People Watch With the Sound Off

Why subtitles aren't a luxury

Picture someone opening your video on public transport, in an office, or beside a sleeping child. If they understand nothing without sound, they'll scroll past and won't come back.

Subtitles also help:

• People who don't hear well — reason enough on its own
• People who find your accent difficult
• People watching at double speed
• Search inside platforms, because text is read and indexed

Two different things — don't mix them

Subtitles. Text following everything said, line by line. Their job is making the whole video understandable without sound.

On-screen text. A few words appearing when needed: a person's name, an important figure, a section heading. Its job is clarification, not repetition.

The common mistake is putting all the speech in large type across the middle of the screen — neither comfortable subtitles nor useful clarification.

Rules for Arabic subtitles

A clear font with no decoration. Decorative fonts make quick reading harder, and Arabic is already a connected script, so decoration compounds the difficulty.

Two lines at most. Three lines cover the picture and force the viewer to read instead of watch.

Break at the meaning, not the line end. Don't split "I went to / the market" if "I went to the market" fits.

Give subtitles enough time. A line that appears and vanishes in half a second doesn't get read. Practical rule: at least a second for every three words.

Place them bottom-centre, raised slightly off the edge so the app interface doesn't cover them.

Add a light background or shadow. White text on a bright scene disappears. A soft shadow or semi-transparent bar solves it.

Auto-transcription: useful, but review it

Most platforms and editing apps transcribe speech automatically. This saves real time.

But always review the output, because automatic Arabic transcription frequently errs on:

• Names of people and places, especially local ones
• Technical terms
• Words that sound alike
• Dialects — the further from standard Arabic, the more errors

Five minutes of review prevents an embarrassing mistake living in the video forever.

On-screen text: when to use it

Use it in these cases only:

• A person's name appearing for the first time
• A number or date hard to catch by ear
• An unfamiliar place name
• A section heading in a long video
• A correction for something you said and didn't reshoot

Don't use it to repeat your words verbatim. Words appearing exactly as they're spoken distract rather than help, because the viewer reads and hears the same thing and falls behind both.

Simple visual rules

Two colours at most across all the text in a video.

One fixed size for subtitles and another for headings. Don't vary sizes randomly.

No excessive motion. Text that jumps, spins and glows draws attention to itself rather than the meaning.

Test on a phone screen, not a computer screen. Text that looks fine on a large display can be far too small on a phone, and most of your viewers are on phones.

Arabic and English together

If your audience is mixed, you can add subtitles in two languages on platforms supporting multiple subtitle files, letting viewers pick.

Don't put both languages on screen at once. Four lines block the picture and tire the eye, and the result is that nobody reads either.

How this affects the way you speak

Once you know your words will be written out, you'll notice that long branching sentences become many lines on screen.

That's an added reason to shorten your sentences in the script from the start, as covered in Seven Common Mistakes in YouTube Video Scripts.

In short

Add subtitles to every video — it's the smallest step with the largest effect on how many people can watch you.

And use on-screen text sparingly: for names and numbers only, never to repeat your speech. How to order your editing work is in Editing Basics: Start by Deleting, Not Adding.