Vietnamese live captions and productivity tool for lectures

Vietnam is estimated to have approximately one million deaf people and 116,000 deaf children — figures documented by the World Bank's Intergenerational Deaf Education Project. Vietnam's National Statistics Office published a 2023 survey of people with disabilities confirming that 6.11% of the Vietnamese population aged two and older has a disability, with hearing-related disability representing a substantial portion. For deaf students specifically, the educational pipeline narrows sharply at secondary level: only 68% of disabled children reach primary school, and only 31% continue to upper secondary level — meaning the majority of deaf students in Vietnam never reach university.

For those who do reach university, the infrastructure gap is acute. DVV International documented in 2017 that Vietnam had only ten sign language interpreters for the entire country — a ratio incompatible with any meaningful university-level accommodation. The World Bank's IDEO project, which wound down in September 2022, introduced standardized Vietnamese Sign Language (VSL) materials into preschool curricula, with the Ministry of Education and Training authorizing their nationwide use. But secondary and higher education interpreter provision remained absent from the programme's scope — leaving university students without any real-time access solution.

Vietnam's disability survey (NSO 2023) found that people with disabilities are significantly more likely to be out of work, less likely to have completed schooling, and more likely to live in poverty than the non-disabled population. For deaf and hard of hearing students at Vietnamese universities, this structural exclusion begins in the lecture hall: Vietnamese — a tonal language with six pitch contrasts, monosyllabic structure, and Northern-Southern variation — is among the most demanding languages in the world for lip-reading, and no institutional captioning provision exists at scale.