Netflix has teamed up with SignUp Media to add American Sign Language interpretation to 73 kids’ and family titles, giving Deaf children and their parents a new way to experience roughly 200 hours of Netflix’s biggest hits together, starting July 20.
“Deaf children may not read yet, or read fast enough to keep up with closed captioning, and deaf adults want to watch content in their native language,” Mariella Satow, founder of SignUp Media, told Parents. “Family movie night should mean everyone experiences the story together, not one person doing the work of making it accessible while everyone else watches.”
The rollout spans 41 franchises and properties, according to IndieWire, the largest ASL translation effort in entertainment history. The list runs from originals like STRANGER THINGS: TALES FROM ’85, THE SEA BEAST and GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S PINOCCHIO to licensed favorites such as POKÉMON HORIZONS, THE MAGIC SCHOOL BUS RIDES AGAIN, OCTONAUTS and COCOMELON.
“At Netflix, we believe great storytelling should be accessible to everyone, and this partnership is a meaningful continuation of that commitment,” Elisa Beniero, Netflix’s senior manager of strategy and innovation, said. “With ASL now joining subtitles, Subtitles for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, dubbing and Audio Description as another way members can enjoy our content, we’re ensuring our Deaf and hard-of-hearing members have more ways to experience the stories they love.”
SignUp delivers the interpretation through a free Chrome extension rather than baking it into the Netflix app itself. Viewers install the plug-in, pick a title and an interpreter appears in a separate window that can be resized and moved around the screen. Every performer in the project is Deaf and a native signer, cast with an eye toward matching the tone and personality of the character they’re voicing in sign.
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That distinction matters more for kids than it might for adults. Research cited by Engadget points to a persistent gap: Deaf children often test below grade level in reading, which means subtitles alone can leave them chasing a story rather than living inside it the way their hearing siblings do.
“When I started SignUp Media, I believed the Deaf community deserved access to entertainment in their language at the same scale everyone else takes for granted,” Satow said. “Partnering with Netflix to deliver 200 hours of kids and family content is that vision made real and it’s just the beginning. Hollywood is starting to understand that sign language isn’t an accommodation, it’s a language, and we’re building the infrastructure to deliver it.”
SignUp isn’t new to this work. The company built its reputation earlier this year with the Oscars Project, which interpreted every 2026 Best Picture nominee in ASL, and it already provides select titles for Disney+, Peacock and YouTube. Netflix’s 73-title deal is by far its biggest swing yet.
For families, the change is less about the technology than what it makes possible on an ordinary Friday night. Callie Foster, an advocate for Deaf children whose son Luca has mild-to-moderate hearing loss, told Parents the tool will reshape her family’s weekly movie night, letting Luca watch alongside everyone else instead of catching the story secondhand through an interpreting parent.
That’s really the heart of it. A movie night was never supposed to require a translator sitting between a child and the story. Netflix and SignUp Media are simply catching up to something Christian parents have always understood: every child, hearing or not, deserves to sit at the table and take in the whole story, not just the parts someone else had time to explain.
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