Azerbaijani live captions and productivity tool for communicating with deaf & hoh

More than 12,000 people in Azerbaijan are officially registered as having hearing and speech disabilities, according to the country's Deputy Minister of Labour and Social Protection. Official registration, however, is tied to the disability benefit system, and researchers consistently find that administrative counts underestimate actual prevalence — particularly among older adults and rural populations who do not seek formal registration. The Global Burden of Disease 2019 study estimated that hearing loss affects approximately one in five people globally, a figure that, applied to Azerbaijan's population of ten million, suggests the real number is substantially higher than the registered count.

Azerbaijani Sign Language (AzSL) has no formal legal recognition. The government has supported some technology initiatives — including a mobile AzSL learning application backed by private sponsors — but there is no statutory right to sign language interpretation and no publicly funded national interpreter service comparable to those in Western Europe. Deaf and hard of hearing Azerbaijanis seeking interpretation for anything beyond official medical or legal appointments must arrange it privately, at their own cost.

In daily life, the gap is most acute in ordinary domestic settings. Family conversations at home, neighbour exchanges, market transactions, casual social gatherings — none of these settings are covered by any formal accessibility provision. Deaf and HoH Azerbaijanis navigate them through a combination of lip-reading, gesturing, and dependence on hearing family members. The social toll is real: studies of comparable populations across the region consistently document elevated rates of social isolation among deaf adults who do not have access to real-time communication tools.