I’m 30 and only recently learned I had moderate to severe hearing loss. A few days ago I picked up my new hearing aids and realized I haven’t heard a cat really purr since I was in early high school. I’m sitting here now with my sweet Chester and listening to him purr like a little motor and realizing how lucky I am.

Its frustrating that people cant even understand that deaf and h.o.h. are very diverse and that ASL aint global nor is English writing.

Just cause a deaf person knows English it doesn't mean we know ASL and those who know ASL aint necessarily English language users.

My dad is 90+ and profoundly deaf. Phone calls were basically impossible for him — he'd pick up and just couldn't follow what the other person was saying. Visitors too, he'd miss most of the conversation and just nod along.

I put together a 10" touchscreen that sits next to his phone and shows live captions as people speak. It taps into the landline via a USB telephone recorder, and there's a conference mic for in-room conversation. It automatically detects when a call comes in and switches between the two.

He can adjust the font size and colour scheme via the touchscreen (big S/M/L buttons), and scroll back through what was said. When it's quiet it just shows a clock.

Accuracy is around 90-95% with a cloud speech engine, and it falls back to offline recognition if the internet drops. The whole thing cost about £120 in hardware (Raspberry Pi 5, touchscreen, mics).

Happy to answer questions if anyone's interested. Code is open source if you want to build one:
https://github.com/andygmassey/telephone-and-conversation-transcriber