English live captions and productivity tool for job interviews

In the United Kingdom, 56% of deaf and hard of hearing people report experiencing workplace discrimination — and 37% say it happened as early as the job interview itself (RNID / Deaf Unity survey). The employment rate for people with hearing loss sits at 65%, compared to 79% for non-disabled people. For those who use British Sign Language as their primary language, the gap is more severe: only 37% are in work, versus 77% of non-disabled people. On average, people with hearing loss in the UK are paid £2,000 less per year than the general population — a gap that amounts to £4 billion in lost income annually across the workforce.

The interview format is where much of that gap is created. The standard English-language interview is unstructured, fast, and built around listening without aids. Asking for a repeat is socially costly — it signals a failure to engage with the question. Hearing candidates in the same room process the same question with no effort; deaf and hard of hearing candidates spend cognitive bandwidth following it. The scoring system does not account for that difference. Research also found that deaf candidates who requested formal accommodations — such as a sign language interpreter — sometimes had their interviews cancelled entirely.

In the United States, the National Deaf Center's 2022 Census analysis found that deaf people are significantly underrepresented in higher-earning occupational fields, with employment gaps persisting across every industry sector despite ADA protections. The pattern is consistent across English-speaking countries: the gap is not driven by qualifications, but by the accessibility of the hiring process itself. Captio AI lets a deaf or hard of hearing candidate walk into an English-language interview in London, New York, or Sydney, place their phone on the table, and read every question in real time — without requesting accommodations in advance or asking the interviewer to change anything.