Why captions are suddenly everywhere and how they got there

People with hearing loss have long adopted technology to navigate the world, especially since hearing aids are expensive and inaccessible to many

People with hearing loss have a new ally in their efforts to navigate the world: Captions that aren’t limited to their television screens and streaming services.

The COVID pandemic disrupted daily life for people everywhere, but many of those with hearing loss took the resulting isolation especially hard.

“When everyone wears a mask they are completely unintelligible to me,” said Pat Olken of Sharon, Massachusetts, whose hearing aids were insufficient. A new cochlear implant has helped her a lot.

So when her grandson’s bar mitzvah was streamed on Zoom early in the pandemic, well before the service offered captions, Olken turned to Otter, an app created to transcribe business meetings. Reading along with the ceremony’s speakers made the app “a tremendous resource,” she said.

People with hearing loss, a group estimated at roughly 40 million U.S. adults, have long adopted technologies to help them make their way in the hearing world, from Victorian-era ear trumpets to modern digital hearing aids and cochlear implants.

But today’s hearing aids can cost upward of $5,000, often aren’t covered by insurance, and don’t work for everyone. The devices also don’t snap audible sound into focus the way glasses immediately correct vision. Instead, hearing aids and cochlear implants require the brain to interpret sound in a new way.

“The solutions out there are clearly not a one-size-fits-all model and do not meet the needs of a lot of people based on cost, access, a lot of different things,” said Frank Lin, director of the Cochlear Center for Hearing and Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. That’s not just a communication problem; researchers have found correlations between untreated hearing loss and higher risks of dementia.