Accessibility: Enable filtering out Badges, Sub-Time, and Emote text for screen readers
Hi Twitch! Screen reader users should be able to read and participate actively in chat like everyone else. However, translating chat into an audio signal is really tedious at this moment, because visual elements like all badges incl. subscriber-time of sub badges, and emotes cannot be filtered out.
Especially when a lot of hype is happening in chat, emotes can become very overbearing when read out one by one. Therefore, I'd like to request a feature with which those visual elements and emote text can be filtered out, leaving the username and chat text only for translation into an audio signal. This would highly improve the chat experience for screen reader users.
Thank you so much for considering this.

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joshuajaimepr commented
Voz
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KevinDoo commented
Genuine feature request, this would be great! Got some friends with visual impairments and they would be way more on twitch if this is fixed!
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Lain_2779 commented
Its not a full fix, but I would at least make people aware of a workaround with frankerfaceZ.
Its a third party addon for use with twitch. I use it heavily to clean up chat. It has an option to hide badges of your choice.
I dont care if someone was at twitchcon in 2018, I dont care they got a dinobadge for some reason. I just want to see their subbadge and name. And FFZ lets me do that, and a lot more.
Not sure how easy it would be for people that use screenreaders to set up, but could be worth looking into. It cleaned up chat a lot for me.
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VariablyGeeky commented
I have pointed this out elsewhere, but I feel it is important to mention here.
This is something that ALREADY exists for Twitch in other manners of the site that they can easily and quickly modify/add for this purpose. This should not be a community request that takes them a long time.
For you moderators, take a look under your settings for "Show Mod Icons", this is exactly what would be needed to make a call to hide badges. The badges are all under one class within the page source so switching badges off would turn off everything before the username.
Emotes are a little more complicated but not by much. They too have their own class that can be triggered the same way. Twitch also already has Emote-Only Mode that could be adapted from a stream settings to a user setting and strip or ignore all emotes instead of only allowing them.
Most of the code is already written and only needs IDs changed. The switch can easily be copied and given it's own ID and the Javascript Toggle is only 2 lines, most of which would just need to have a couple places where a new ID is placed.
The rest that I can't see or that is obscured should not be a work load that takes Twitch a week to manage for someone that works there with knowledge of how the calls are handled behind the scenes.
This isn't a big ask from the community and the solution is not one they have to create from the ground up. The solutions are already in place and only need to be adapted to suit this request.
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V2Blast commented
Yep, what pitermach said. It's easy to see all the things that would clutter the chat for screen readers by just trying to copy a message by someone with several badges (mod, sub badge, etc.), especially a message including emotes/cheers:
---
1:04Moderator
6-Month Subscriber (6-Month Badge)
GLHF Pledge
V2Blast
: [I've redacted the actual message content here] awcozyLOL
LUL---
I can only imagine it's a mess for screen readers to try and parse all that.
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pitermach commented
Since it doesn't look like you can reply to comments, to @Zombaekillz and anyone else not sure what the suggestion is, here's how things work now. If you're looking at the chat with a screen reader on the web or have it reading automatically, every badge of the user gets announced before their name and message. Ideally, what people would like to hear is something like, "Pitermach: Hi there!", instead of "12 month subscriber badge moderator badge pitermach: Hi there!".
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itsluciebee commented
This is an important consideration for making Twitch more accessible. Thank you for raising this!
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MandaMandrake commented
Thank you for putting this out there! I hope they work on it.
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UnicornyKy commented
Amazing suggestion! I hope Twitch works on this!
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queerlybee commented
This seems like such a wonderful suggestion to include everyone on Twitch, including disabled viewers!! Please implement this.
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Seum commented
I do hope Twitch implements this. This would be so incredibly helpful to more and more of our communities. <3
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PlayWithMae commented
This would be amazing! We already put so much work to make our panels readable for screen readers, but that doesn't do much if Twitch chat isn't accessible.
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verymaryandy commented
I agree! I think this is a great idea and would make twitch more accessible.
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ModernChow commented
This is a great suggestion!
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BlindMusicLover commented
As a blind user I can confirm that this would be a very good start, but I would also like to bring to everyone's attention that the only way for me to participate in a stream is through the popout chat window since the regular stream pages have become completely unreadable for screen readers. And unfortunately many functions like the follow button, in chat polls and even the stream title or the name of the streamer are not available in the popup chat.
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saiyan4414 commented
I am a legally blind it twitch streamer and I use a screenreader and i agree this would really help.
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SightlessKombat commented
Thank you so much for considering this. As others have stated, I'd like to see emotes and badges be separate filter options for greater customisation, as though you might not need to see how long everyone has been subscribed for, you'll likely want to see emotes most of the time.
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Dengster commented
Totally agree with this.
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pitermach commented
I definitely agree, especially when it comes to the mod and sub badges, which coincidentally are already filtered out on the iOS app. I'd like to have a filter for badges and emotes to be separate options though as I can think of times I'd like to hear when people are sending them in less active streams.