Subtitles
Text rendering of dialogue, traditionally for translation rather than accessibility — though usage has blurred in recent years.
Historically, 'subtitles' referred to translation of spoken dialogue from one language to another (e.g., English subtitles on a French film), while 'captions' referred to a same-language transcription including non-dialogue audio cues for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers.
Modern usage has blurred: many platforms (YouTube, Netflix) use 'subtitles' as the user-facing label for what's technically closed captions, regardless of language. The distinction is preserved in regulatory and accessibility contexts (the FCC, WCAG) where 'captions' specifically refers to accessible text rendering.
For event captioning purposes, the practical difference is what's included beyond dialogue: captions include speaker labels and audio descriptions like [APPLAUSE]; subtitles typically don't.