Chinese live captions and productivity tool for meetings

China's 27.8 million people with hearing and speech disabilities face exclusion from professional life at a structural level. A study on China's disability employment legal framework (PMC, 2020) found that despite a statutory quota requiring employers to reserve at least 1.5% of their workforce for disabled employees, most disabled workers in China are confined to informal and low-quality employment. The quota is routinely not enforced, and employers consistently cite communication barriers as the primary reason for not hiring deaf workers — barriers that are never addressed in the workplace itself.

Chinese law has no formal recognition of sign language, which means there is no interpreter standard for workplace settings, no legal mandate for captioning in meetings, and no established protocol for accessibility in the professional environment. A deaf Chinese worker who joins a company is legally protected on paper but practically unsupported in the setting where their exclusion is most acute: the meeting room, the video call, the client presentation, and the team briefing where decisions are made and careers are shaped.

Hearing loss prevalence in China rose 125% between 1990 and 2021, according to a Global Burden of Disease analysis published in Frontiers in Public Health (2025), and is projected to continue increasing as China's population ages. Research using national survey data found that hearing loss is associated with 12.9% fewer annual work hours — a measurable reduction in professional participation that compounds over a career. The infrastructure to support deaf and hard of hearing people in Chinese professional life is not keeping pace. Captio AI captions Chinese speech in real time — across regional accents, formal business registers, and English–Mandarin code-switching — so the team meeting, the client pitch, and the job interview are no longer settings a deaf person has to navigate alone.