Glasses That Can Caption!

Yesterday I noted in my Good News Network newsletter a new device to help Deaf people understand speech through a a pair of glasses.  Sounds amazing!  I read up on it to learn more.  It was developed over in Great Britain so it’s not available here yet.  Here is how it works: it’s a simple pair of glasses that the Deaf person wears. Using Alexa and a cable for a cell phone, voices become captions that appear on the glasses. 

The article showed a Deaf woman wearing the glasses and holding a cell phone to her ear. She’s reading the other person’s message on her glasses.  Seems cool.   The picture looks like the woman is going to answer with her voice.  This would work for someone who was once hearing or has excellent speech skills.  But some Deaf people have difficulty with speech.  Would this option work so well then?

A major issue is that the program can’t cope with cross talk.  Well, what good is it then?  It seems that’s when a Deaf person might need those glasses the most.  I remembered family gatherings when I was younger.  We’d be either with my mom’s side of my family or my dad’s.  Everyone would be sitting in a circle to try to include my parents but they always got lost in the cross talk.  My parents didn’t want me to interpret and I wouldn’t have been able to keep up with it anyway.  They’d try to lipread but with crosstalk, who was speaking when?  My parents would sit there with vague smiles on their faces, nodding, and pretending they knew what was going on.

In an interpreting situation, I handled cross talk by requesting that one person speak at a time.  People tried to do that but sometimes in a heated situation, they couldn’t help themselves and many voices would try to drown each other out.  The interpreter has to listen carefully and then sign as much of the differing opinions as possible before asking again, “Please speak one at a time.”

This idea is still very much a work in progress.  Now that my parents, aunt and uncle have passed, I have lost my connections with the Deaf community.  I’m curious to know what they think of this new potential technology?