Teaming Up With Captions

I’m a product designer at a technology firm, who has hearing loss. My team has a lot of virtual meetings, and I rely on captions for those meetings. Even with captions, I can miss pieces of the conversation trying to synthesize what I'm hearing with what I'm seeing via lipreading and what I'm reading in the captions. When there's a mismatch between what I got from listening and lipreading and what the captions said, I'm not always sure which is right. Luckily, my team was up for a little experiment.

We tried running a meeting with our speakers turned off, relying only on captions. From that experience, everyone realized that it was easy for team members with hearing loss to lose the thread of the conversation when something went wrong with the captions.  Now we all turn our captions on. It gives all of us a chance to monitor them and share the responsibility for communicating well.