Punjabi live captions and productivity tool for lectures

Pakistan's Federal Minister for Health has cited that 4.8% of Pakistan's population — approximately 11 million people — has hearing problems. Punjab is Pakistan's most populous province, accounting for approximately 60% of the national population. Research has documented that consanguinity rates in Punjab are as high as 80%, and consanguinity is a primary driver of genetic hearing loss: a study published in PMC (PMC8544867) found that GJB2 gene variants account for at least 20% of all severe-to-profound hearing loss cases in the Southern Punjab population of Pakistan. Pakistan's WHO EMRO data (2023) found that 47.5% of children with hearing impairment faced moderate challenges in social participation.

For deaf and hard of hearing students in Punjab, university access is severely constrained. Pakistan has approximately 250 trained sign language interpreters for a deaf population of millions — a ratio that makes university-level interpreter provision essentially impossible at scale. A study from the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office documented significant impacts on children's schooling and family burden from hearing impairment in Pakistan. In India, the Punjabi-speaking deaf community faces the same national infrastructure gap: ISL unrecognized, interpreter provision ad hoc, and university captioning absent.

Both Pakistani and Indian Punjab share a common challenge: Punjabi-medium higher education is delivered in a language with lexical tone, four-way aspiration contrast, and retroflex series — among the most demanding combinations for lip-reading in South Asia — with no real-time captioning provision and no institutional mandate for accessibility in ordinary lectures.