Impact of Audio on Adaptive Japanese Subtitles and Captions Ruby

Abstract

Subtitles and closed captions, originally intended for individuals with hearing impairments, have gained widespread usage among non-hearing-impaired individuals. This study focuses on adapting subtitles and captions, particularly the incorporation of the kanji ruby, for non-hearing-impaired users. Our study investigated the necessity of kanji ruby by subjecting non-hearing-impaired adults to audio content through experiments employing Welch's t-test. Additionally, we proposed and evaluated an adaptive model for determining whether ruby should be added to kanji captions based on the experimental outcomes. The results indicate that optimizing kanji ruby requires considering not only the difficulty of the kanji characters and the user's proficiency but also the audio content.