Arabic live captions and productivity tool for meetings

The Middle East and North Africa has over 11 million people with disabling hearing loss. For deaf Arabic speakers in professional environments, the meeting room is the most acutely inaccessible setting they face. A 2023 study evaluating accessibility in higher education in Arab countries (PMC/Heliyon) found that communication barriers — the absence of interpreters, captioning, and accessible formats — were the primary driver of exclusion across formal institutional settings. In the corporate sector, where no equivalent of a disability studies office exists to flag accessibility gaps, the barriers are total and unmonitored.

Saudi Arabia has one certified sign language interpreter for every 93,000 hearing-impaired people, according to the same research. Across the Arab world, the ratio is comparable or worse. Arab companies operating internationally have no sign language standard, no captioning framework, and no policy requiring accessibility in meetings. The formal legal protections that exist — in varying forms across different Arab states — do not specify meeting accessibility, and most companies are not aware they have any obligation at all.

Arabic-speaking economies are among the world's fastest-growing professional environments, with multinational investment, remote work infrastructure, and cross-border business expanding rapidly across the Gulf, the Levant, and North Africa. The deaf and hard of hearing professional population is being systematically left out of this growth — not through explicit exclusion but through the absence of any infrastructure to include them. Captio AI captions Arabic speech in real time — including Gulf, Egyptian, and Levantine dialects, MSA, and English-Arabic code-switching — so the team meeting, the client call, and the interview are no longer settings a deaf person has to navigate alone.