Well, I’ve been messing with this so long I can’t tell if this is a nice compromise or if I split the proverbial baby. Oh well, here’s a mockup of the new SDH look, current on top, new on bottom:

There’s no doubt I like the new font. In fact, the more I see the new font, the crappier and more amateurish the Arial font looks IMO. Dang.

Something more than the normal contrast seems likely helpful for SDH. If you’re deaf and can’t read every single subtitle quickly and easily, that’s pretty bad, so I want to avoid that. You’ll see that in addition to the semitransparent block, there’s still a thin opaque black border around the text which is useful against very bright backgrounds. I think it’s an improvement. Does it meet high readability standards? Is it overkill? At least I’ve seen subtitles that look like this before, so I know I’m not the only one. I’m inclined to think it’s a little too transparent right now, but that may be only because I’ve been staring at it too long.

DVD downscales will have to use solid black, however, as DVD subtitles have 1-bit transparency.

EDIT: They’re clickable images now so you can see more detail. And yes, the new subtitles are technically dimmer than the originals in terms of RGB values – same as the Arabic example above. That shows how much letter thickness enters into perceived brightness.