Ukrainian live captions and productivity tool for everyday conversations

Before the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, Ukraine had more than 2 million people with impaired hearing, including approximately 36,000 people with complete hearing loss, according to the World Health Organization. For deaf Ukrainians navigating daily life, the ordinary barriers — fast informal speech, Russian-Ukrainian code-switching, absence of interpreter provision — were already significant. Since 2022, those barriers have been compounded by an entirely new one: deaf Ukrainians cannot hear air raid sirens. ActionAid documented in 2024 that deaf people regularly cannot reach bomb shelters in time because the primary warning infrastructure is entirely acoustic.

The WHO reported in 2023 on the specific vulnerabilities of Ukraine's deaf community during the conflict, noting that emergency information is not provided in accessible formats and that services available to deaf people before the war have largely disappeared. By June 2022, the World Federation of the Deaf estimated that over 5,000 deaf Ukrainians had fled the country. The Ukrainian Society of the Deaf coordinated the evacuation of over 6,299 deaf people from the most dangerous regions in the first year of the invasion. For those who remain, daily life happens in a context where communication barriers are life-threatening, not merely inconvenient.

Beyond the immediate crisis, Ukraine's long-term deaf and hard of hearing population faces the same structural barriers that existed before the war — insufficient interpreter provision, no accessibility in everyday informal settings, and a significant portion of the deaf community that struggles with text-based communication. Captio AI captions Ukrainian speech in real time — including Surzhyk and Ukrainian-Russian mixing — so the bakery, the clinic, and the family gathering are no longer settings that must be navigated alone.