Born with profound hearing loss, I've spent fifteen years in an industry that runs on conversation, eleven of them at a fully remote company. My comprehension in meetings went from roughly 30% to somewhere near 100%. That change wasn't willpower. It was six technologies arriving one after another.

Hearing aids, subtitles, text-based communication, Bluetooth, live captions, smart glasses. I'll walk through what each one actually changed, and where each still falls short.

What emerges isn't a disability story. Subtitles work in noisy rooms, text works across time zones, captions are searchable: accessibility features help everyone, and they are still almost never the default. You'll leave with three concrete things you can do to your own product tomorrow. Every choice a developer makes either includes or excludes 15% of users.