10 Controversies Netflix Wants You To Forget
9. Accessibility Issues
Just a quick aside into my life; I live in a subtitle house. When we watch movies or shows, or even play video games, the subtitles are on. Some of you will be horrified at this while others know it blends into the background so that you aren't consciously reading them after a while. As an early cord-cutter, one feature I loved was being able to download subtitles to the shows I watched and DVDs I'd bought, watching them via media applications for the full effect.
And then came Netflix, which made cord-cutting mainstream by taking away the need for so much of the technical know-how. However, with an increase in accessibility to the service came a reduction in the amount of options available to users.
One of the things that took a hit was subtitling. With users no longer able to simply download subtitles for a show from third-party fair-use sites, a lot of the content on the site came without any subtitling at all. This led to Netflix being sued by the hearing-impaired several times.
They've gotten better since then, even starting to include audio descriptions for the visually impaired on their original content.