Peter O’Dowd: Before the pandemic, a lot of us hadn't heard of Zoom.

But since March, the

video-conferencing platform has sky-rocketed in popularity, connecting office workers, families
and friends. But advocates for people with hearing-loss say that Zoom hasn't connected
everyone. That's because Zoom's basic free video plans don't include real-time closed
captioning. That service is only available to regular users for a monthly fee. Hearing health
advocate Shari Eberts is trying to make the service free for everyone. She's founder of the
online community Living With Hearing Loss. Shari, welcome.

Shari Eberts: Thank you so much for having me.

O'Dowd: And how are people with hearing loss navigating the pandemic now that so much of
our work is online? We're doing things remotely. We're not face to face, and often our mouths
are covered with masks.

Eberts: It has been a very challenging time for everybody, but definitely for people with hearing
loss during the pandemic. As you mentioned, masks really take away our super power of
speech reading or lip reading in face to face conversations. And then on video conference calls,
it is nice that you're able to see the person, but it still is very difficult to really follow
conversations. The poor audio is usually a factor. Internet connections are sort of spotty. And
especially if there's multiple people on the video conference call, it's hard to know where to look,
who's speaking. It's definitely a challenge if you use lipreading to augment your residual hearing.

O'Dowd: Sure. Can you, because Zoom has become so normalized for all of us, can you kind of
like just walk me through what a typical Zoom call might be like for somebody who has hearing
loss?

Eberts: Yeah, a typical Zoom call for someone with hearing loss is really tough and stressful. So
you dial in early and you try and set yourself up so you're in speaker mode so that you have the
largest possible picture of whoever is going to be speaking. But, you know, sometimes I'll
connect with headphones to really try and improve the audio. But it's a very difficult situation.
People have different audio quality in terms of the way they're speaking. Sometimes people are
cutting in and out and the image won't match their lip movements and it won't match the sounds
of their words. So it's very difficult to follow and really captioning is a very simple way to make
that all go away. If we had captions, then it would be much easier for us to be able to follow the
conversation and also to participate. You know, it's hard for us to want to jump in or to share our
thoughts because we're not sure what's been said. And obviously there's a lot of trepidation
about looking silly or repeating something that someone just said. So it's definitely a stressful
situation.

O'Dowd: So to that point of captions, I mean, that's the solution, right? And you wrote an open
letter to video conferencing companies in the spring soon after the pandemic broke out. Google,
Microsoft, Zoom and you asked them to make their captioning services free, which because
now you can pay for them, right? I mean, what became of that letter?
Eberts: Well, it really was amazing. So like you said in April, I wrote this open letter and I was
amazed at the uptake. People with hearing loss really felt that it resonated with them. And
someone suggested that I turned it into a petition. And so I did. And after about five days, we
had 6,500 signatures and I was pretty excited about that. But now we have almost 58,000
signatures. And if you read through the comments on that petition, you can see what an
important issue this is for people with hearing loss. And Google pretty quickly moved its
automatic speech recognition or ASR captions, as they're known, out from behind their paywall
for everybody. And I was thrilled. And the hearing loss community was just thrilled. And about a
month or so later, Microsoft did the same thing. And Zoom really has been the one to lag behind
and their platform is used the most often. So it really is the most challenging for people with
hearing loss. And Zoom has very high-quality ASR captions, but they are currently stuck behind
a paywall. So if you don't have a premium plan like a business plan or an enterprise plan, which
cost about $200 a month, you're not able to access these captions. And I find that very
disappointing.

O'Dowd: Well, we reached out to Zoom to see if we could get some answers as well, but we
didn't hear anything either. But walk me through this technology just a little bit more. This is kind
of fascinating. I mean, what does it take to caption a live conversation like the one we're having
now?

Eberts: So the gold standard of captioning is something called communication access real time
translation. So I dare you to say that five times fast, but we call it CART. And that's where a live
transcriber types what's spoken in real time. So there's actually a person there. But technology
is rapidly catching up. And now there are a handful of these very high quality automatic speech
recognition options. And this is where the computer just listens to what's spoken and is able to
turn it into a written format, there are a number of different companies that do this, and I believe
that Zoom has partnered with Otter, which is a company that has very high quality AI, and the
accuracy is very, very good and very good, especially for more personal communications.

O'Dowd: I mean, that sounds complicated. So what do you say to people who might be listening
to this and respond with, well, you know, to get a live person there to transcribe your
conversation, that takes a lot of effort. That takes a lot of time and money. AI computer
generated captioning, that's got to be complex. You should pay for it. What do you say to them?

Eberts: Well, what I say is that you would never build a building. Right. And include ramps and
then ask people in wheelchairs to pay to use them. And I think the same thing holds for people
with hearing loss in this case. The captions are our ramps and the captions exist. The ASR
captions exist and they're behind the paywall. But I don't understand why we should have to pay
to use the feature we require for equal access.

O'Dowd: On your petition, many signers describe the alienation that they felt when they're not
able to fully understand what's being said in a Zoom meeting. I just wonder if you could talk
about the emotional impact of not having this resource, because from what I already know about
hearing loss is that it can be isolating even in normal times.
Eberts: That's absolutely right. And the lack of these captions on Zoom calls has taken a really
huge emotional toll on people with hearing loss during this pandemic. I mean, everything has
moved online, right? Work, school, social interactions and entertainment. So imagine seven
months of social isolation, not only from in-person visits with your friends and family, but also
without the ability to converse comfortably with them, virtually either. And as you know, many
people with hearing loss are seniors who may live alone. And so the isolation and the sadness
can really be overwhelming.

O'Dowd: Well, Shari Eberts is a hearing health advocate and founder of the online community
Living With Hearing Loss. Shari, thanks for sharing your experiences with me. I do appreciate it.

Eberts: Thank you so much.