Macedonian live captions and productivity tool for meetings

North Macedonia, with a population of approximately two million, is an EU candidate country whose disability support infrastructure has undergone legislative reform but remains under-resourced in practice. The GBD 2019 study (The Lancet / PMC7960691) places global hearing loss prevalence at approximately one in five people — a rate that translates to roughly 400,000 Macedonians living with some degree of hearing difficulty. The country's lower-middle income status means that hearing aids, cochlear implant programmes, and professional accessibility services are disproportionately inaccessible to those without private means.

North Macedonia ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2011 and adopted a National Strategy for Equal Rights of People with Disabilities, but implementation has been inconsistent. Sign language interpreter provision for workplace settings is limited outside Skopje, and captioning services for professional meetings are essentially non-existent as a standard workplace accommodation. The combination of limited institutional support and a bilingual Macedonian–Albanian professional environment in the western parts of the country creates a compound exclusion for deaf professionals in those regions.

The country's EU accession process has brought disability rights into sharper focus, but the pace of change in workplace accommodation has been slow. A deaf professional in a Skopje IT firm, a Bitola textile company, or a government agency anywhere in the country faces meetings that are fully inaccessible without real-time captioning — not because of individual employer indifference, but because the tools and infrastructure simply do not exist as a standard provision. Captio AI provides real-time Macedonian captions on a personal device, giving a deaf professional access to every word of a Skopje board meeting or a Bitola factory briefing without institutional infrastructure.