Toward Enhancing Subtitle Features in Mobile Apps: Analyzing User Reviews for Accessibility and Usability Insights
Wajdi M Aljedaani, Matheus Souza, Marcelo Medeiros Eler · 2026 · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26) · doi:10.1145/3772318.3791606
Summary
This large-scale study analyses user reviews from the Google Play Store to understand how people experience subtitle and caption features in mobile applications. The authors extracted roughly 180 million reviews from the top 340 Android apps across diverse categories, then applied keyword filtering, manual inspection, and a multi-stage labelling procedure involving five researchers to distil a curated dataset of 48,872 subtitle-related reviews. The methodology combines qualitative thematic analysis with quantitative sentiment analysis, using the Nicolai et al. taxonomy (Complaints, Feature Requests, Problem Reporting, Compliments, etc.) to categorise feedback, and Fleiss's Kappa (0.84) to establish inter-rater reliability. Four research questions frame the investigation: the prevalence of subtitle content across app categories, the themes that emerge from accessibility-specific reviews, users' overall sentiment, and the particular accessibility challenges reported. The authors interpret their findings through three HCI accessibility theories: Ability-Based Design (ABD), Design for Social Accessibility (DSA), and Value Sensitive Design (VSD). Entertainment (41.3%) and Video Players (39.7%) dominate the dataset, with MX Player, Instagram, YouTube and Netflix contributing the highest review volumes. The paper positions app-store reviews as a naturalistic data source that surfaces accessibility breakdowns traditional controlled studies miss, and argues that subtitle failures should be understood as situated, multi-layered breakdowns rather than isolated UI defects.
Key findings
Overall sentiment toward subtitle features is predominantly negative (61.63%), with only 27.42% positive and 10.95% neutral. Complaints (31.9%) and Problem Reports (27.5%) together form the majority of feedback. Eighteen themes emerged from the thematic analysis: the most prevalent were Lack of Subtitles (23.97%), Text Formatting (15.88%), Language Support (11.62%), Editing (10.12%), and Display Issues (8.16%). Synchronization (4.84%) and Accessibility (5.86%) were also significant. Within accessibility-specific reviews (n=2,864), Auto Subtitles dominated user concerns (58.9%), followed by Keyboard Shortcut Control (26%) and Voice Control (25.8%). Display Issues reviews were overwhelmingly negative (96.34%), as were Synchronization complaints (73.96%). Font Style reviews showed unusually high positive sentiment (83.23%), suggesting handscript fonts and custom styling are appreciated when offered. Users frequently reported embarrassment in shared viewing contexts (classrooms, group viewing) when subtitles failed, pointing to social consequences beyond usability. The Education category, despite a small sample (n=42), showed 59.5% negative sentiment, indicating subtitle failures extend beyond entertainment into learning contexts.
Relevance
For practitioners, this paper is a practical reminder that subtitle and captioning features remain under-developed even in the most widely-used mobile apps, and that users are actively requesting richer customization (font size, colour, style, background, positioning, speed) rather than simple on/off functionality. The mapping of user complaints to WCAG 2.2 Perceivable, Distinguishable, and Adaptable guidelines, and to ABD/DSA/VSD theories, gives accessibility teams language for framing subtitle work as an inclusion issue rather than a cosmetic one. The limitations are meaningful: the dataset is Android-only, English-only, and biased toward dissatisfied users who post reviews. However, the sheer scale and the identification of recurring failure modes (auto-caption reliability, multilingual coverage, sync drift after updates, lost customization on app updates) offers a ready-made backlog for product teams working on media apps, and a baseline for regression testing subtitle accessibility across releases.
Tags: subtitles · captioning · mobile applications · user reviews · app store analysis · sentiment analysis · hearing impairments · customization · multilingual accessibility
Standards referenced: WCAG 2.2