I’ve been a long‑time Twitch user and recently became deaf, and I’ve realized there’s no built‑in way for viewers to enable captions on live streams or VODs. Right now, the only way to get captions is if the creator manually sets up an OBS plugin or a third‑party captioning tool, which means console streams like PS5 have no options at all, and viewers are left with zero ways to follow the audio.

This forces me to be stuck reading the chat and watching the streamer’s facial expressions to try to piece together what’s happening, which is exhausting and still leaves me missing most of the actual conversation. This makes accessibility depend entirely on the creator, even though Twitch is a multi‑billion‑dollar platform that should be providing basic closed captions as a standard feature.

Deaf viewers shouldn’t have to rely on third‑party accessibility tools or beg creators to turn something on; Twitch should move away from making accessibility the creator’s responsibility and add a native button that lets any viewer turn captions on themselves, so we’re not locked out of content just because the broadcaster didn’t enable it.