Charlotte Hyde: Caption glasses may not be as exciting as people think

When I learned about sign language gloves – technology that claims to be able to interpret signed conversations – I thought I had seen it all. Recently, I was proven wrong. 

Caption glasses are the newest ‘Disability Dongle’ in town.  

New glasses powered by augmented reality (AR) allow people with hearing loss to see spoken words converted to written words @rexchapman pic.twitter.com/EyxcZlAcUX

— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) March 22, 2022

The glasses use augmented reality (AR) to map automatic captions into the real world, allowing users to get captions without having to look at another piece of technology.

On the surface, this seems like a brilliant idea. I’ve always joked that I’d like captions in real life, and this product can supposedly give me that. 

However, in reality? Automatic captioning technology needs quiet environments to work at it’s best, and even then, it isn’t perfect. How would these glasses fare in a pub, for example, or a café?

The places I would need these glasses the most are also the places they would be the least effective. Automatic captions are so bad in some quiet situations that they are nicknamed ‘craptions’. How would this technology fare with background noise? 

What about deaf or hard of hearing people who already wear glasses? It seems that abled people assume that everyone is assigned one disability, and the thought that a deaf person may need prescription glasses hasn’t occurred to them. Additionally, this product isn’t accessible for DeafBlind people in the slightest. 

I fail to see how this product would help me. In fact, I feel that it would cause me more issues than it would fix. I predict that the eye strain from focusing on the words would give me terrible headaches. The words constantly being in motion would probably trigger dizziness. The captions are awkwardly placed, too. As a friend pointed out: people already find it odd that I stare at their lips – now I’m supposed to stare at their chests instead? 

Products like sign language gloves and caption glasses have one key flaw: they place the burden of communication on the deaf person. It’s another way for hearing people to not be held responsible for accessibility anymore, as they can simply insist on this tech being used.

The developers also don’t seem to have thought about how this doesn’t help a deaf person communicate back to the person speaking to them. If the deaf person wearing the glasses is a BSL user, for example, and the other people in the conversation don’t know BSL, then an interpreter would still be needed. This renders the glasses essentially useless, as an interpreter would do a far better (and more accurate job) of relaying the conversation to the deaf person.

Communication is a two-way street. Deaf people work twice as hard to access conversations than hearing people. Why would I need caption glasses, when a hearing person could simply remember how to be deaf aware? Why would I accept sub-par captions in a work meeting, for example, when I could have an interpreter or a palantypist? 

I understand that there is an argument that caption glasses would be more financially accessible for some people, but with speech-to-text software coming built into some mobile phones – or accessed cheaply on app stores – it, again, renders the glasses essentially useless. They’d perhaps be a cool novelty purchase for a couple of months, but with so many low-cost options available: I can’t really see a market for them. 

What do you think? If caption glasses become a reality, would you give them a go?