Ukrainian live captions and productivity tool for lectures

The WHO European Region estimates approximately 190 million people across Europe have some hearing loss — 20% of the population. Ukraine, with a pre-war population of approximately 44 million, carried a proportionate share. Ukraine's national disability registration system documented hundreds of thousands of people with hearing-related disability before the 2022 full-scale invasion. The conflict has dramatically disrupted the deaf community's access to education, rehabilitation, and social services: universities have relocated, students have been displaced across Europe, and the infrastructure that existed for deaf and hard of hearing students — already limited — has been disrupted.

Ukrainian Sign Language (Українська жестова мова, UZhM) exists as a community language but has limited formal institutional support. Before the war, Ukrainian universities did not systematically provide real-time captioning in ordinary lectures. For deaf and hard of hearing Ukrainian students now studying remotely from Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, or the UK, the challenge is compounded: they follow lectures conducted in Ukrainian — a phonologically demanding language with hard-soft consonant pairs, surzhyk variation, and formal academic register — in an environment with no captioning infrastructure and no in-person institutional support.

War displacement has also created a new mixed linguistic context in Ukrainian universities. Students who grew up in eastern Ukraine with surzhyk or Russian-dominant backgrounds are now enrolled alongside western Ukrainian students in institutions where standard western Ukrainian is the medium of instruction. For deaf students trying to lip-read in this environment, the phonological variation is substantial — and all of it occurs without any captioning.