Supply the best captions & retain valued employees

How having the best captions can help

Consider how appropriate support and the best captions can bring added benefits to your business.

Do you know how many of your employees have hearing loss?

Chances are it’s more than you think. 15% of all adults have hearing loss. And as only 16% of hearing impaired employees wear a hearing aid, the majority remain invisible.

With employees working to an older age and young people at increased risk of hearing loss, the number of staff members who have trouble hearing is only going to increase.

So, what can you do to ensure valued employees can keep working?

1. Ask the experts

It can be hard for employers to know how to get the best captions and support for their employees. So we suggest the first thing you do is to ask them what they feel they need.

If that still leaves queries, it’s time to call in external experts. In the UK organisations can benefit from Access to Work, a government scheme that provides free assessments of disabled employees’ needs.

An alternative is to ask a company with disability expertise for advice. They will assess your employee and advise on the best captions, equipment and other services to help.

2. Provide the best captions and support

The best captions and support for your employees don’t have to cost a lot. In fact, much of the support you can offer requires an outlay of just time and effort. Examples of positive support include:

• Getting your employee’s attention before you speak
• Facing them so they can lipread
• Giving them first choice of the seats in a meeting room
• Communicating via email or instant messaging

If employees need extra support like equipment or live captioning, you needn’t worry about the best captions or support blowing your budget:

• In the USA, your business may be eligible for up to $5000 tax credits
• In the UK, Access to Work may fund all or part of the cost.

Finding the best captions

Want your employees with hearing loss to understand and participate fully in meetings, training and seminars? Live captioning is the answer.

A range of companies offer captioning. But how do you work out who supplies the best captions?

You could take time to read through all the websites to compare services. So, for example we emphasise how our live captioning:
– Streams up to 300 words per minute
– Appears with less than 1 second time lag
– Streams naturally word by word rather than in chunks of text.

But the simplest way to assess what the best captions are is to test them. That’s why we offer a FREE trial of remote, live captioning so you can compare what we believe are the best captions on the market to those offered elsewhere.

What have you got to lose (except valued employees…)?

Lisa Caldwell works freelance as an accredited Phonak Roger Pen trainer with Credo Communications. You can catch up with her at credocommunications@gmail.com