Designing live captions people can actually read on stage

DataBoss Lyrics has one job: put the right words on screen, at the right time, in a room where the person reading them might be forty feet away under bright stage lighting.

Contrast before style

Most caption tools are designed for a phone screen a foot from your face. On stage, low-contrast text and small type just disappear. We tuned type size, weight, and background contrast specifically for a room, not a device.

The result looks plainer than most caption products. That was the point — legibility for the person on the fourth row beat visual flair every time we tested the two against each other.