Hello,
I am a blind user of Plex since about a year, and I have used it perfectly fine for my needs. It works well with the screen readers I do Use (a screen reader reads aloud everything via voice so I can interact with the application’s interface).
Today I’d like to make a suggestion in order to improve something I find important. Currently, it is possible to make plex web to read subtitles automatically by using our screen readers by modifying the role attribute of an element. I’d like to suggest to add such piece of code (role=“alert”) to the subtitles DIV so our applications will detect any changes in subtitles and read that automatically. Currently we tend to paste this line in the chrome console in order to make it working, but we have to do it every time we need to play something, which is a bit annoying and of course confusing for less advanced users: ‘document.getElementsByClassName(“an2”)[0].setAttribute(“role”, “alert”)’.
I hope this very little change would be added in the near future, so this accessibility improvement will be enjoyed by many other blind people out there wanting to use plex and watch subtitled content.
Best regards.
Doing a little bit of more research, the role can be added instead to the element with the class name “Subtitles-measure-3cYuWS”. I think this one is a bit cleaner.
that’s really amazing. Please do let me know if you need additional information.
We’ve added role="alert" onto an element with the class “Subtitles-renderer-” it’s one level deeper than “Subtitles-measure-”. Should be an equivalent experience but I mention in case you are curious.
This change will be in our 4.33 release. Its release is anticipated in the first week of May.
This will improve your viewing of videos with simple text formatted sidecar or embedded subtitles.
Image based subtitles like DVD’s VOBSUB or Blu-ray’s PGS will be burned in by PMS. We aren’t able to read these aloud. We could add real-time OCR but it’d be challenging to get really good results out of it. Anecdotally, I OCR’ed the PGS subs from my LoTR blu-rays. There was a plethora of edits required to teach the engine right from wrong.
ASS text subtitles are burned by default. Changing this requires some steps:
- navigate to “Settings”
- click on “Player” link below the “Plex Web” header on the sidebar
- click “Show Advanced”
- change “Burn Subtitles” to “Only image formats”
- click "Save Changes’
Thanks for bringing this to our attention and, in particular, being kind and providing the role suggestion. We’re happy to make it right. 
2 Likes
Thank you very much for the fast response! I will take into account the suggestion regarding ASS subtitles. Image subtitles are not needed to be read, we all understand that image stuff are rather difficult, even with OCR, so this is something most blind people are aware of.
Something interesting is that this automatic subtitle reading works already in all iDevices. I have an iPad and have tried in someone else’s Apple TV. It works this way because the Apple’s screen reader already has an option to read all subtitles in all applications. I guess the operating system has a way to tell the screen reader about those subtitles so it can fetch the text in those. IT would be great if the same goal could be achieved in Android: That would make plex the only one application to be accessible in android when it is about Subtitles. Though I’d need to research a bit more about how this might be done. I think it would require to comunicate with the Android’s accessibility API in some way (I’m a software developer but I am mostly using Python and Android i still relatively new to me).
Thank you again for this change, this certainly will make the experience, from a blind guy’s perspective, much more enjoyable and will make us able to watch content in original language.
