This has necessitated a team of translators, and a host of challenges: The screens only hold 72 characters, and the old-fashioned dot-matrix-style, all-caps format makes accents and diacritics difficult, which is one reason the Met doesn’t offer French titles.

“Porgy and Bess” brings its own set of obstacles. To depict the black denizens of Catfish Row, the opera’s coastal-Carolinas setting, the librettists, Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward, notoriously used an idiomatic English that was long referred to as “Negro dialect,” an especially uncomfortable strategy given that both writers were white. Charges of cultural appropriation have ebbed and flowed since the work’s premiere in 1935.

For many, the titles compound this unease: Hearing Bess give soaring voice to her newfound love can feel different than staring at the words “I’S YOUR WOMAN NOW.” When the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, S.C., presented the opera in 2016, it initially opted not to use titles for that reason.

“The language is so colloquial that it can feel dated,” Nigel Redden, Spoleto’s general director, said in an interview. “And those words become much more prominent with supertitles.” (Two performances in, however, complaints from audience members who had difficulty understanding the words prompted Mr. Redden to change course and add them.)