Albanian live captions and productivity tool for job interviews

A joint survey conducted by the Albanian National Association of the Deaf (ANAD), the Finnish Association of the Deaf (FAD), and the Albanian Institute of Statistics (INSTAT) in 2015 found that the unemployment rate among deaf adults in Albania was three times higher than among the hearing population at large. Before this survey, no systematic data on deaf Albanians' access to education and employment existed — highlighting how invisible the community had been in national policy.

Access to sign language education has historically been limited in Albania. The country's first legislation specifically addressing disability rights was enacted in 2014, and Albanian Sign Language has yet to receive formal legal recognition at the national level. Without early access to signed education, many deaf Albanians enter the job market with communication gaps that compound the already difficult experience of a spoken-language interview conducted without accommodation.

The WHO Global Burden of Disease 2019 study estimated that working-age adults bear a disproportionate share of the economic costs of unaddressed hearing loss — estimated at over USD 980 billion globally each year. In a country of approximately 2.8 million people with a historically underfunded disability support infrastructure, the impact is concentrated among those with the fewest alternatives. Captio AI gives deaf and hard of hearing Albanians a way to follow a job interview in Tirana or Shkodër word for word, in real time, without requiring an interpreter or any advance arrangement with the employer.