What Is The Best Font For Subtitles For A Great Viewing Experience?

by Julian Canlas

What is the best subtitle font for a great viewing experience? You’ve added subtitles to your videos, expected increased engagement, but your viewers are complaining that your subtitles are hard to read! What’s the best subtitle font and stylings for your online videos?

Many video content creators use VEED’s powerful, yet easy-to-use, subtitle tool that can accurately and automatically add and translate subtitles and change caption font based on accessibility and branding needs.

We’ll be covering:

  • What is the best font for subtitles that suit your needs?
  • What should you look at when editing your subtitles font?
  • How to automatically add accurate subtitles and translations with VEED
  • How to style subtitles with VEED

We hope that you find this guide useful!

What Is The Best Font For Subtitles that Suit Your Needs?

Accessibility is incredibly important to focus on as a creator, and finding the best subtitle font can help make this process even easier.

There isn’t just one preset ‘best font for subtitles that everyone should use online, though. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines don’t actually specify which fonts meet their guideline of ‘readable and clear text’.

Therefore, it’s important to get to grips with what types of fonts there are, in order to make the best decision. The main 5 font families are generally assumed to be;

As a general rule, most mainstream sans serif fonts are great for subtitles. Serif fonts like Times New Roman can be a bit hard to read because of their curved ends. Sans seris fonts are simplistic, without any excessive decoration or curls, and read well in dozens of languages. Here are subtitle fonts for a great viewing experience:

  • Arial - One of the most widely-used fonts out there, they’re great for closed captioning, because they’re easy to read and do not interrupt the viewing experience. This is one of the best fonts for subtitles.
  • Helvetica - Very similar to Arial. Helvetica is just slightly less curvy, but it’s one of the most popular choices for closed caption fonts. This could be a great font choice for subtitles.
  • Roboto - Again, this looks very similar to the previous two. It’s also getting more common as it’s the default choices for text on Android devices. This is one of the most common fonts out there.
  • Verdana - This is a great choice to help viewers who are dyslexic, thanks to the wide character spacing.
  • Tahoma - This font provides clear glyph shapes like Verdana, but with much tighter spacing. Opt for this if you want really unintrusive captions, but they can be harder to read for dyslexics.

Sans serif fonts cater to a wide range of needs and are an easy choice for subtitles.

What Should You Look At When Editing Your Subtitles Font?

  • Font size. Your captions should be big enough to remain readable whilst not affecting the viewing experience.
  • Font color. For example, don’t use white captions in a predominantly-white video. Make sure your font is in a color that allows for easy reading.
  • Caption resolution. This is especially important if your captions play automatically on the video. You want your captions and subtitles to be readable, not blurry and pixelated, especially in low resolution screens. Therefore, it’s better to have them as closed captions you can separately activate with the video player. The quality of burned in captions deterioriate alongside video quality. This isn't the case for closed captions.
  • Video background. Your background colors shouldn't clash against the font color.

How To Automatically Add Accurate Subtitles And Translations With VEED

To help you out with your editing process, we’ve picked out the key steps to bear in mind when adding subtitles and translations with VEED. You can add automated closed captions with VEED's subtitle generator in a few clicks!

1) Upload video

To start off with, upload your video. VEED works well with content uploads from local files and your camera, YouTube video links and Dropbox, too.

2) Pick between auto, manual and file

Head to the Subtitle button in the left hand toolbar, and choose from automatic subtitles, manual subtitles and subtitles uploaded from an external file.

VEED accepts subtitle uploads in the form of SRT, ASS, VTT and SSA files.

3) Verify and check accuracy

Once you’ve picked your subtitle or closed captions, it’s important to verify them and to double check whether they’re correct.

If you’re looking to translate your subtitles, you can do so with VEED, too. In the Subtitles tab in the left hand toolbar, you can find the option to translate.

In the Translate tab, you will be presented with the language drop-down menu. Select your language, and VEED will translate your subtitles smoothly.

Again, do make sure to verify the accuracy of the translation.

4) Download

Under the Options tab, you can download the closed captions or subtitles as separate files.

After you’ve finished working through these steps, it’s time to download your video! Hit the Export button in the top right hand corner to start this process.

You can download VEED projects as MP4 files, or as GIFs. If you’re looking to share your work with more people, why not share the download link? It’s a great way to get more eyes on your video content .

How To Style The Subtitles With VEED

Now that we’ve discussed what makes up the best subtitle font and how to add both subtitles and translations with VEED, let’s take a look at stylisation.

1) Under Subtitles in the left toolbar, go to Styles

To access VEED’s subtitle editing tools, head to the subtitle button in the left hand toolbar and click on styles.

As you’ll be able to see, there are a number of different options to pick from- covering everything from subtitle fonts to letter spacing.

2) Change font from our choices or upload your branded ones

To find the best subtitle font possible, it’s good to know how to change fonts. VEED has some eye-catching ones to experiment with, which you can find under the previously mentioned styles tab.

Note: You can also upload custom fonts, if you want to upload and use branded fonts for subtitle usage.

But do keep in mind that regardless of your preferred choice for subtitles, you want your text to be easy to follow, especially in low resolution screens. Aesthetic fonts might look pretty, but you're going for readability.

To change the font, tap the drop down menu and pick out the font that suits your video project the best. For the image shown here, we selected Arimo as it’s a clear, sans serif font that works well for subtitles.

3) Font size and color

Choose through different subtitles fonts.

To change the font size, make sure you’re still in the styles menu and choose your desired sizing from the drop-down menu in the top row.


To adjust the color of your subtitle text, head to the T shaped icon next to the font size drop-down menu. You can pick a color from the palette, add in a hex code or even use the pipette tool.

4) Alignment

To adjust the alignment of your text, make sure that you’re in the Styles tab again and head to the second row under styling.

The long tab with the three options is the one that will adjust your alignment. Select your desired option from this- we’d recommend central alignment for subtitles.

5) Letter spacing, case and line height

In the third and fourth rows of the styling menu under Styles in the left hand toolbar, you can access tools to adjust your letter spacing, letter case and line height.

To adjust your letter spacing and line height, simply type in your desired metrics into the two elements- VEED will sort this automatically.


To adjust your subtitle case, choose from the three options in the menu. You can pick from CAPITALS, lower case, or Camel Case.

6) Various effects

Finally, it’s worth noting that VEED has some great effects that can help to add depth and character to your video.

You can access the effects tab under the styles tab in the left hand toolbar, and they’re simple to apply- simply tap on them.

Ready to Add Subtitles to Your Videos?

All in all, content in 2020 should have subtitles — no exceptions. Having effective, clear-to-read subtitles is essential for keeping content accessible. Picking the best subtitle font can take time, but it’s absolutely worth spending time looking into it.

But of course VEED is so much more than a subtitle generator. It's a simple, yet powerful, video editor to add text to video, add audio files, change video speed, and so on for a variety of videos.

If you’re looking to read more about video editing and VEED, do make sure to check out our website. We’ve got plenty of handy blog posts up for grabs, and we’re sure that you’ll love our YouTube and Instagram guides, too.