Dutch live captions and productivity tool for job interviews

A 2025 PMC study examining employment outcomes of deaf and hard-of-hearing people in the Netherlands using non-public national microdata found that DHH claimants — people who received sensory disability care — were more likely to have income from sick leave, disability pension, or social benefits compared to a matched Dutch population. DHH workers had lower average hourly wages, worked fewer hours per week, were concentrated in specific employment sectors, and stayed in their first job significantly longer than non-disabled peers — indicating lower labour market mobility and fewer opportunities for advancement.

In Belgium, the employment gap is even more documented at the hiring stage. Research cited in a Hearing Health Europe report found that deaf candidates in Belgium receive 53% fewer interview opportunities than equivalent hearing candidates — a direct measure of the discrimination happening before employment even begins. Belgium's disability employment gap reached 35.3 percentage points in 2022. ABN AMRO's analysis of the Netherlands found around 600,000 Dutch people with a disability sidelined from the labour market, noting structural barriers in the hiring process.

The interview stage is where these gaps are created. Dutch corporate interviews — at banks, consulting firms, tech companies, and public sector organisations — are fast, verbal, and conducted without standard captioning. The guttural consonants, vowel reductions, and regional accent variation that characterise Dutch make it phonologically difficult to lip-read even for highly skilled deaf candidates. Captio AI requires no employer arrangement: open the app at the start of the sollicitatiegesprek, place the phone on the desk, and every Dutch sentence — guttural G included — is available in real time from audio.