Netflix has decent subtitles, but sometimes they can be hard to read if they appear over a light background, or if your eyesight isn’t what it used to be. Fortunately, you can customize those subtitles to make them look however you want. Here’s how to change their size, font, color, background, and more.
To find the subtitle settings, open up Netflix in your browser, hover over the profile icon in the top right corner, and choose Account.
Scroll down to My Profile and click “Subtitle appearance.”
This page has a bunch of fun options for you to tweak. At the top, you’ll see a small window with a sample subtitle on a cloudy background. This will update whenever you make a change, so you can see how your subtitles will look. Here are the options you can change:
Font. This lets you choose between seven supported fonts, including a cursive font, a small caps font, and a font that looks dangerously close to Comic Sans. Use this power wisely. Next to the font drop down, there’s a color picker. You can choose from eight pre-selected colors to display your text in. You can also make the text semi-transparent. Text Size. You can choose between small, medium, and large text, but note that Netflix means it. Large text takes up a huge chunk of the screen. This is probably best for people with poor eyesight, but medium will work fine for most people. Shadow. This lets you choose from a few effects to help separate text from the background. By default, Netflix uses a drop shadow, but you can also use a raised or depressed bevel effect, or choose Uniform for an outline around the entire text. Next to the shadow dropdown, there’s a color picker you can use to change the shadow or outline to one of the same eight colors you can use for your font. Background. This creates a solid color background around just the text that appears on screen. This will only be as wide as each line of text. Once again, you can choose one of eight colors for this background, and make it semi-transparent. Window. This also creates a background behind your text, but this one will always be a rectangle large enough to go around every line of text, with a little extra padding. In the image at the top of this article, the blue box is the “window” while the yellow box is the “background. ” You can use one or both to help separate the subtitle text from the background. Like the font and background color, you can make your window one of eight colors, or semi-transparent.
Play around with these settings until you find something that you like. When you’re done, click Save at the bottom of the page.
If you’re in the middle of a video on Netflix, you’ll need to refresh it in order for the changes to take effect. These settings apply account-wide, so your subtitles should look the way you want no matter what you’re watching.
