In my experience Closed Captions almost always describe sounds, specially if they happen offscreen or things like the type of background music; Subtitles don't, I assume they expect you can hear the sounds.
Subtitles frequently describe entire background conversations I can't hear when I'm watching at home. Maybe I should turn up the sound to a ridiculous level.
This was taken to a ridiculous extreme in the marvellous The Spanish Prisoner, where the whole point at the end is that you can't hear a certain conversation—but it's still subtitled!
Also, Closed Captions always describe sounds and lines of background dialog (like TV) that I definitely can’t hear in the sound.
As a non-native English speaker who can hear I often see movies and shows with English audio and English closed captions, the redundancy helps me. It happens all the time that the CC tell things that you just can’t hear in the movie.
> Subtitles don't, I assume they expect you can hear the sounds.
Many—though not as many as it should be—(English-language) movies explicitly include two English-language subtitles, "English" and "English SDH", standing for "English (subtitled for the deaf and hard-of-hearing)". The latter includes subtitling for sounds.
Which makes sense, "Closed Captioning" (CC) is different than "Subtitles", in that the purpose of CC is to provide on-screen text (captions) for deaf/near deaf viewers, while subtitles is captions for just dialogue.
During the apocalypse, I leaned on video for "company" while doing chores. I stumbled onto the Descriptive Video Service, which I guess is super duper Closed Captions.
I love it. I can half watch the show while fussing without missing anything. Even when the show has my complete attention, the added detail is kinda great. Not all the time, but enough to keep things interesting.
I accidentally turned this on at the beginning of Toy Story 4. The narration had me convinced that the movie was taking place in a future where Andy was in film school and we were watching him working through his first film based on his childhood toys.
Felt like a fool when I realized it was really super caption for the visually impaired.
