Arabic live captions and productivity tool for everyday conversations

The Middle East and North Africa is home to over 11 million people with disabling hearing loss — and that figure counts only those above the clinical threshold for disability, not the broader population with partial hearing loss. For deaf Arabic speakers, exclusion from ordinary life begins not in hospitals or schools but in the souk, the family majlis, the taxi ride, and the neighbourhood pharmacy. These are not formal, institutional settings — they are the texture of daily Arab social life, and they are entirely inaccessible without sound.

Sign language interpreter provision across Arab countries is among the lowest in the world. Saudi Arabia has one certified sign language interpreter for every 93,000 hearing-impaired people, according to research published in Heliyon (PMC). Educational systems for deaf children focus primarily on MSA literacy, which has limited overlap with the colloquial dialects that govern everyday life. There are no captioning standards, no accessibility obligations, and no interpretation services for informal daily settings across the Arab world.

Hearing loss prevalence in the MENA region is rising, driven by an ageing population, high urban noise exposure, and limited preventative healthcare infrastructure in lower-income Arab countries. The WHO projects a continued global increase in disabling hearing loss through 2050, and the Arab region will not be exempt from that trend. Captio AI supports Arabic speech in real time — including colloquial dialects across the Gulf, Levant, Egypt, and North Africa — so the souk counter, the family majlis, and the taxi conversation are no longer settings that a deaf person has to navigate alone.