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

Finland became one of the first countries in the world to grant constitutional recognition to its national sign language, enshrining Finnish Sign Language (FSL) rights in 1995. Approximately 14,000 people in Finland use FSL, of whom around 5,000 are deaf and use it as their first language with written Finnish as a second language. Despite this formal protection, the gap between constitutional right and practical access persists: interpreter availability in healthcare, legal settings, and everyday life outside formal contexts remains uneven.

Studies of childhood hearing impairment in Finland document a prevalence of approximately 1.1 per 1,000 live births for hearing impairment ≥35 dB HL in southern Finland, with similar figures in eastern regions. Deaf children born into hearing families — the majority — grow up navigating Finnish everyday speech at home without sign language support from parents who have not yet learned FSL. The family dinner table, the neighbourhood gathering, and the workplace lunch break remain informal communication spaces that formal interpreter services do not cover.

The approximately 9,000 additional FSL users who are hearing — parents, siblings, interpreters, and community members — form a relay network that partially bridges the gap. But for deaf and hard of hearing Finns whose hearing families speak Finnish at natural speed with regional accents and colloquial contractions, the everyday communication load remains high. Global burden data (PMC7960691) contextualises Finland as part of a region where formal systems are relatively strong but the informal communication gap at home persists regardless.