466 million people live with hearing loss. Real-time captions make your stream accessible and grow your audience at the same time.
Enable Free Captions →Live streaming has become one of the world's dominant entertainment formats, with tens of millions watching Twitch, YouTube Live, Kick, and Facebook Gaming every day. Yet for the 466 million people globally who live with disabling hearing loss — a World Health Organization figure — the vast majority of that content is completely inaccessible.
Streamers talk constantly. Their personality, humor, strategy, and storytelling all happen through their voice. Without captions, deaf and hard-of-hearing (HoH) viewers are cut off from the core layer of the content they came to enjoy. Twitch does not provide native live captions. YouTube's auto-captions are delayed and inaccurate on live content. Kick and Facebook Gaming have virtually nothing.
StreamTranslate solves this with sub-500ms latency real-time captions integrating directly into OBS. In under 10 minutes, any streamer can go from zero accessibility to fully captioned broadcasts — and the benefits extend far beyond the deaf community to non-native speakers, silent environment viewers, and anyone who watches with the sound off.
According to the CDC, approximately 15% of American adults — about 37.5 million people — report some degree of hearing difficulty. In Australia, 1 in 6 people have some form of hearing loss. Globally, the WHO projects this number will rise to 700 million by 2050. On Twitch's 140M+ monthly user base, applying 15% prevalence suggests 14-21 million users have some form of hearing loss — a massive underserved audience segment.
On Twitch, communities organized around deaf gaming — #DeafGaming hashtags and Discord servers for deaf gamers — have thousands of active, engaged members: subscribers, donors, and clippers who actively seek accessible creators. Making your stream accessible is not charity. It is smart audience development.
Imagine watching your favorite streamer with the sound completely off. You see the gameplay. You read chat. But you cannot hear the commentary, reactions, or stories. You miss subscriber shoutouts, chat debates, the spontaneous moments that define a streamer's personality. You are watching a silent film inside someone else's community. That is the daily experience for deaf Twitch viewers on streams without captions.
The browser source URL displays captions as part of your stream video feed. Every viewer on every platform sees them automatically — no action required. This is the open-captions model, identical to captions burned into a TV broadcast.
The StreamTranslate Twitch Extension gives viewers the ability to enable or disable captions on their side. Deaf viewers who want them get them; others can toggle off. This respects viewer autonomy.
Visit streamtranslate.live/setup. Free trial, no credit card required.
From your dashboard, copy your unique browser source URL.
Sources → + → Browser. Paste URL. Width: 1920, Height: 160px. Drag to lower third.
Visit streamtranslate.live/twitch to activate viewer-controlled captions for your Twitch channel.
Confirm captions appear within one second of speech, then go live.
WHO estimates 466 million people worldwide have disabling hearing loss. With 140M+ monthly users, millions have some degree of hearing loss.
No. Twitch has no native live captioning as of 2026. StreamTranslate fills this gap.
Sub-500ms — fast enough to feel synchronous with live speech.
Yes — 50+ languages for real-time translation.
A free trial is available.
Yes. The OBS overlay is platform-agnostic.