Spanish live captions and productivity tool for lectures

A 2023 Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) study found that 5.4 million students across Latin America and the Caribbean face hearing difficulties — yet fewer than 3% of these students are officially recognised by the education system. Over 5.2 million children with hearing impairments are effectively invisible to the schools they attend. The IDB describes this as an identification gap: without recognition, there is no accommodation, no captioning, no support (IDB, 2023). In Spain, the INE survey found approximately 1,064,000 people with significant hearing loss — in a university system where hearing disabilities represent 7.2% of all reported student disabilities, but almost no provision of in-lecture captioning exists.

A 2025 PMC study on university adjustment among deaf and hard of hearing students confirmed that communication barriers in lecture-based settings remain the primary driver of academic underperformance across multiple countries — independent of students' intellectual capacity (PMC12505907, 2025). Spanish-language universities have been slow to implement real-time captioning: interpreter training is limited, and in much of Latin America there is no consistent national standard for sign language interpreter provision in higher education. In Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Peru, deaf students report navigating university lecture halls with minimal or no formal support.

The structural gap is compounded by the diversity of Spanish itself. A deaf student in Caracas who has worked to develop lip-reading skills for Venezuelan Spanish encounters a Madrid professor whose Castilian sibilants and rhythm feel visually foreign. The support mechanisms that exist — where they exist — are designed for a single national variety, not the full range of Spanish-speaking university contexts a deaf student may move through.