Afrikaans live captions and productivity tool for communicating with deaf & HoH

The National Council for Persons with Disabilities (NCPD) of South Africa reports that between 4 and 5 million South Africans live with hearing impairment, of whom approximately 600,000 are Deaf and use South African Sign Language (SASL) as their primary means of communication. The prevalence of hearing impairment at public primary health clinics was documented at 26.7% in one study (PMC6306974), reflecting a high underlying burden especially in communities with limited access to specialist ear care. In 2023, SASL was added to the South African constitution as the country's twelfth official language — the first African country to grant a sign language official constitutional status.

Despite this milestone, the gap between constitutional recognition and daily reality is substantial. For deaf and hard of hearing South Africans who are Afrikaans-speaking, the challenge is layered: they navigate a linguistic minority language that operates as an informal primary language across much of the Western Cape and Northern Cape, where interpreter services are sparsest and formal deaf education infrastructure is thinnest.

Research into the impact of COVID-19 pandemic response measures on deaf adults in Cape Town (PMC11219557) documented acute social exclusion: mask mandates eliminated lip reading as a strategy, and digital communication tools were inconsistently accessible. The study highlights the fragility of deaf South Africans' communication access when the informal compensatory strategies they rely on are suddenly unavailable.