A Conversation with Thibault Duchemin, the Inventor of AVA

Thibault Duchemin grew up in Paris, France as the only hearing person in a deaf family. Sign language was his first language, and he experienced from a very early age the multiple challenges that deaf and hard-of-hearing people face in understanding and communicating with the rest of society. Helping his family navigate between the hearing and the deaf worlds led Thibault to found Ava, a mobile-based artificial intelligence that empowers people with hearing disabilities by allowing them converse in real-time with family, friends and coworkers.

Thibault holds a double Master of Engineering from UC Berkeley and Ecole des Ponts ParisTech. In 2017, he was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 in Consumer Technology and is a member of the Hearing Loss Association of America Board of Trustees.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidriemer/2022/05/11/how-captioning-app-ava-used-storytelling-to-raise-163-million/?sh=7016ebd54d50

You can listen to this episode wherever you stream podcasts and at www.3cdigitalmedianetwork.com/empowear-audiology-podcast

For more information about Dr. Carrie Spangler- check out her Linktree at https://linktr.ee/carrie.spangler.

For transcripts of this episode- visit the podcast website at: https://empowearaudiology.buzzsprout.com

Transcript

Announcer: [00:00:00] Welcome to episode 55 of EmpowEAR Audiology with Dr. Carrie Spangler.
Carrie: [00:00:15] Welcome to the EmpowEARAudiology Podcast, a production of the 3C Digital Media Network. I am your host, Dr. Carrie Spangler, a passionate, deaf and hard of hearing audiologist. Each episode will bring an empowering message surrounding audiology and beyond. Thank you for spending time with me today, and let's get started with today's episode. Hi, welcome to the EmpowEAR Audiology podcast. And before I dive in today, I wanted to take a minute to share a bio about today's guest. I have Thibault Duchemin with me today, who grew up in Paris, France as the only hearing person in a deaf family. Sign Language was his first language, and he experienced from a very early age the multiple challenges that deaf and hard of hearing people face in understanding and communicating with the rest of society. Helping his family navigate between the hearing and the deaf worlds led him to find Ava, a mobile based artificial intelligence that empowers people with hearing challenges by allowing them to converse in real time with family, friends and coworkers. Thibault holds a double masters of engineering from the University of Berkeley and Paris Tech, and in 2017, he was named a Forbes 30 under 30 in consumer technology and is a member of the Hearing Loss Association of America Board of Trustees. So thank you for being a guest today and the EmpowerEAR AudiologyPodcast.
Thibault: [00:02:02] Thank you for having me, Carrie. It's a pleasure.
Carrie: [00:02:05] Yeah, well, I thought we would start off with your background story, your personal family story, and how that kind of guided you into your life purpose.
Thibault: [00:02:16] Yeah. So as you mentioned, I, I basically sort of like navigated through my family. So from the very beginning, the deaf and the hearing world. Um, I remember I think being 7 or 8 years old and doing my first demonstration in France with my family, where we can have like groups of us all together and we're defending sign language as a, as a language to be recognized by society. Um, so my parents and my sister are deaf and I was not born deaf, but grew up with sign language and kind of like, you know, obviously always kind of been facing those kind of challenges. Um, you know, I was at home at the end of the day discussing, you know, school, discussing work and seeing in many different ways, shapes and form the ways that, you know, challenging situations arise, moments of miscommunication, even more frequent. And all of this kind of like, you know, obviously growing up, you want to fix something. So you start by answering the phone. You start by intermediating and interpreting in situations where it's hard to find an interpreter. Parents are, you know, speaking sign language mainly. And I was always there until the moment I was not there anymore and kind of moved to the US and where the question of how can I continue to be a good family member, a good CODA sort of arise. And it led to Ava being one of the solutions for all the CODAS out there who are interested in and still helping and supporting their family in empowerment and autonomy.
Carrie: [00:04:00] Wow. Yeah. Sometimes I think it's our the challenges that we have along the way that make us very creative in problem solving.
Thibault: [00:04:09] Definitely.
Carrie: [00:04:11] So there's do you have any other stories to share about your experiences as a family role of being a CODA that you wanted to share before we move on to some of the AVA technology?
Thibault: [00:04:29] Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I think it will be weaved across the interview, you know, just because of the questions that usually touch very real life situations. And I tend to really bring personal life and and situations just as examples. So let's let's let's move on to different topics and then, you know, we'll probably bring some stories there.
Carrie: [00:04:54] Okay. That sounds good. Um, so I know that I watched your TED talk that you did back in July, I think 20th of 2017, and it was titled Don't Silence Your Anger. Find your purpose with it. That's a pretty strong and emotionally driven title. Can you share a little more about how that title came to be?
Thibault: [00:05:18] Yeah, it's a strong title. Um, I would say sometimes people are afraid of strong emotions for sure. And, you know, we live in a society that tends to mislabel anger or really sort of designate it as an emotion to be afraid of for a reason. I think, you know, acting from a place of of speed and rush the emotional state doesn't always yield to great outcomes. I'm talking about a different kind of anger. It is something that sits with you. That is maybe what I would say is the healthy part of the anger. It always gives us a signal, right? Like if there's anger, there's, um, maybe a frustration that is being built up. There's a series of things that we, we find unfair or unjust that should not happen. And I think of anger not about the outcome that is created on society, but more the reason why it's even there. And that's what I pay attention to. And that's why I encourage people to think over it and pay attention to, you know, a lot of advice out there is find your passion. I say find your anger. Look at what it tells you about what is really important for you now. Because, you know, when you think about passion, so much of our passion is influenced by the society around us, right? Like we think we should be passionate about a certain thing and a certain way of living. But anger is just yet another key to say my passion is and sometimes for some people it can really open up a lot of thoughts and self-awareness around this. For me, you know, growing up in a deaf family, a lot of times I would see, you know, my my dad coming back from work and really being frustrated because somebody younger got promoted to be his or her manager.
Thibault: [00:07:11] Right. So you basically have situations where, you know, deaf/har of hearing people are not always promoted to the roles that they should be. There's assumptions and preconceptions about what they can do and what they cannot do. So they don't even bring the deaf person into the decision. That was just something that really frustrated me very young at the very young age and growing up. It's like, you know, watching your own father just not really being this father model because of those problems, like lead you to say, hey, you know, what can be done about this? So this is a personal example, but I found it resonating with a lot of other people. Um, you know, people come to me and they say, Hey, you know, I've not thought about this lens almost because maybe they were afraid to think about it or they kind of like throw the the whole thing, the baby with the water, right? Like, they don't want to to think about anger this way or they're taught to repress it or sort of like get rid of it. But really what it is, it's a scream. It's a signal. It's something that's been, you know, done wrong to me or is not sort of fully sitting with me. And I want to examine it. I want to explore it, and I want to understand what it wants to tell me. It's the message.
Carrie: [00:08:21] Yeah. So you definitely were able to take that anger and funnel it into a purpose. Yeah. You.
Thibault: [00:08:31] Yeah. It's a powerful motivation, I would say, today. I still obviously have the anger when new situations arises that we cannot, you know, honestly, it's like it's the empathy part, right? It's like you hear someone's story and it's in your circle of control, and there's this anger that fuels me to think about how can we do better? What can be more of service to our users, our customers, people who don't know us yet, and acting in ways that are just unconscious and not very thoughtful towards staff helping people. What can we do better so that we can impose a different standard that is more accessible and inclusive? I'll give you an example. You know, during COVID, where everybody sort of switched to different online platforms, that sort of thing, people really, really, really left out in person with masks. It was very hard for them to navigate. I mean, you know, can you imagine like relying on lip reading and suddenly from day to the next, having to basically ask other people to either trade off their health or with this whole kind of psycho situation or, you know, it's kind of like nodding and not knowing what the person just told you. And, you know, even online in their own organization, not really having a say about the solutions that are being kind of imposed. And a lot of those solutions didn't have captions or even ability to ask for captioners or interpreters to kind of connect in the call.
Thibault: [00:09:59] So the usability and experience of deaf/hard of hearing people were just terribly terrible. And a lot of times it was kind of revealing, um, I would say power struggles and different levels of dynamics. And so for us, like seeing this and watching it because we have we had a lot of users and deaf people all across the US and Europe facing those situations, asking us for help, like it led us to develop a version of AVA that also works online. So it's a desktop and mobile based application, just an app, but without talking too much about the product, really what it is behind is that we just get a signal and we get like to be very close to what actually the state of society is. It reveals a lot of unfairness And you know, when you have a lot of this unfairness on your on your chest, it's like there's one constructive way and healthy way to solve it, which is to funnel it into a I would say, a long term project, something that can actually chip at the problem. And there's another way to kind of process it, which is to yell and, and you know, it's just not like be unrestful with it. So I think the challenge of like processing that anger is important. But once you do this, it is a very powerful driver and fuel of energy.
Carrie: [00:11:16] Yeah. I'm glad you have been able to use your anger to drive you to productivity in the in your AVA business. But before we talk about AVA, I know a lot of people have experienced captioning on some level, but I think there can be a lot of confusion too about the terminology of different captioning. So for the purpose of our listeners today, could you give a little cliffnotes version of the difference between what is a subtitle versus closed captioning and open captioning and live captioning? Are those different captioning things?
Thibault: [00:11:55] So there's a big bucket typists is a is also a thing stereotyping, you know, fast typing, typing captions. Look, we live in a world where captions are everywhere now actually more than it was five years ago. And this is good. We have multiple senses and sometimes hearing is not always going to be there, no matter if we're deaf, hard of hearing or hearing. And captions are really are the visual way to transmit information. You know, obviously this is when you don't speak a visual language like sign language, but that's most of the world that is in this situation. And so that's why caption is really, you know, serving everybody who can see and who can read. Um, and I think, you know, captions capture the the, you know this whole job or purpose of transmitting the information with with text with language you know subtitles specifically is about like a prerecorded audio or video that you basically going to sort of like create the captions for. Um, and the file is basically subtitle and subtitling is basically taking something that is prerecorded already existing and adding captions to it. Um, the live captioning is when you do this online and you know, live, you know, where you don't have any sort of like weight or sort of delay between the moment it's being said and the moment you're captioning it to do live captioning.
Thibault: [00:13:29] You basically have multiplicity of technologies. Value typing means quick type in Latin and you know what that means is basically trying to go fast to type and caption You have broadcast captioning, you have stereotyping where you basically use shorthands to type faster and that's usually used in trials and the law just because of the sheer amount of of those situations that calligraphy is also a way to go faster. So there's this multiplicity of situations. We wanted to also simplify this by using the word scribe, by basically sort of saying, hey, you know, instead of kind of naming or having to choose between all of these different jobs, like let us introduce scribe captions, which are basically for us, like another process of creating captions that is being done live and is being done in awareness of the other person who is reading. So a scribe may have more information about the user and the person watching than typical captioners. And this is really kind of reconnecting us to the older, you know, function in  ___ where you had this intermediary between people who didn't know how to read and people who use the the writing, the written language. So we see scribes as more intermediaries and we use scribe captions, which is this professional 99% accurate in in real time technology that is based both on AI and on human accuracy.
Thibault: [00:14:59] Okay.
Carrie: [00:15:00] Yeah. There's so much out there and I agree the last five years has been a big boost. I think COVID helped some of that because a lot of people were like what you were saying, the deaf and hard of hearing community was kind of cut off. And for accessibility purposes, I feel like that really helped in that sense because people were angry about it and wanted something done.
Thibault: [00:15:25] Yes, petitions were made. I mean, we had just an explosion in people using our app and really sort of giving us feedback and then building with them different situations like the scribe service, the ability to use AVA online for Zoom meetings and and meet people where basically saying, Hey, I'm on this platform that, you know, is using this language or basically is in this software is a company software. I cannot, you know, sort of follow what's being spoken about. And we always had this approach of don't make more problems by creating solutions. I think sometimes people complexify what should should happen. So AVA is basically working on top of any situation or any conversation. So you don't need to sort of have an integration for a specific software. It is platform independent. Which kind of like helps you be autonomous. You come into a conversation that'd be online or in person meeting, and you basically have your own solution that will provide you basic level of understanding and expression. So it goes in both ways. And too often I have this situation where even today people use tools like we have the, you know, the captioning tool on Zoom. It's it's great. But the problem is what happens if what I'm saying or what is being printed on the screen is not correct. I have no way to correct it. If I want to answer something and I'm nonverbal and I'm deaf signing, right, I'm going to type in a chat so people can read it. But if you've actually been in a meeting, people are pretty quick at following and the audio space, they don't really look at the chat in real time. So as a deaf person, I'm going to be disadvantaged. So we basically built a series of tool to really help, you know, true integration and inclusion versus like basic compliance, which is accessibility. We go a bit further by just saying, Hey, how do we invest in autonomy? And I think that's kind of the direction of, of the captioning, sort of like state of the art today.
Carrie: [00:17:26] So kind of taking like maybe a little step back. I know you said the anger kind of fueled you to think about this as the purpose or a project that you are going to do. But how did you actually get started? I know you had the idea for AVA, but can you kind of back up and just kind of share how everything did get started?
Thibault: [00:17:50] Yeah, absolutely. Um, well, I think this is a process of building a company is first, you know, building a team around an idea and motivation. We've been always set on making the world more accessible for 450 million people, it's going even to 750 million over the next 20 years. So. The very early stage was a few encounters. You know, I come from a deaf world, like using sign language as a first language. I met a lot of deaf and hard of hearing people on campus in Berkeley where I got started. And at this time, it was really a time of, you know, a lot of hope, a lot of excitement about technology. And maybe at this point we didn't have. A lot of like sort of pessimistic views. So for me, it was really interesting to be at the forefront of machine learning technologies and in the same time, coming from a deaf or hard of hearing background, it's like knowing that this also technology is not often, you know, dictated. Like therefore I think people receive the developments of technology, but they don't get usually to participate in building those technologies. So for me, it was really, really important to, you know, have a say there. I had a sister at the time who was studying law and basically told me like, hey, you know, if I want to be a lawyer, there's no deaf lawyer in France, so how am I going to do? And so one of her first project very early on was to to actually kind of build a glove, a physical glove, to translate sign language.
Thibault: [00:19:25] This is something has been done over the years. You may have seen some videos. It's it got us started. And I would say unlike maybe 99% of the other teams who try to do this, we continued around the mission because in the end, it's like while the glove was maybe not the right form, there was something in there which was the immense pain and difficulties of integration in society of a lot of people. Not everybody. Some people are just very well integrated, autonomous and happy. But there was a really strong driver for us to work on accessibility. And what we noticed is that it was harder, specifically even in the US, we're supposed to be, you know, ADA accessible with a lot of structures. It's just felt that deaf people were still, you know, having difficulties in social situations and specifically group conversations. And when you think about it, it makes sense. You start seeing, you know, multiple people at a dinner table, right? And even a cocktail party situation. People speak. It gets loud in the background. It's like conversations. So sounds can be bouncing. There might be music in the background, right? Like all those deliciously horrible situations that we remember and and it makes it very tough to be in a situation where you're just like, just met someone. So that person may have an accent myself, have an accent, they have a message. And it's like all this thing that just actually how we meet new people, make new friends.
Thibault: [00:20:51] And so if this is not accessible, then it is really hard for a category of the population to make new friends, create professional opportunities. You know, it can happen in some structures like at work, but what about this happenstance, spontaneous thing? The best example is like me. And you know, here I'm bringing some personal stories, but me being next to my mom going shopping and really people going to her and asking her for directions, you know, like how many times can you just, you know, start a discussion with a stranger when someone asks you for a direction many times. Right. But when you're deaf hard of hearing, it can be harder. Much harder. Like my mom used to kind of answer like, hey, I don't hear now. She uses Ava, like she puts up her phone, her app and then says, Wait a moment. And then it captions what the other person says. And she can give that that part of kind of like being a great citizen, being a great member of society. So I think this socialization aspect for us felt the first domino work on this massive problem, you know, because in the end, it's very it's not a technology problem only. It is a full stack problem that requires a full stack solution. So it has multiple components. It's like how like how much patience we have when we are accommodating someone, how much attention we give to like undivided attention to somebody else in 1 to 1 coffee meeting versus in a group conversation.
Thibault: [00:22:14] I don't get as much presence with every guest, especially if one is deaf hard of hearing, right? So it's all those subtleties where it looked very important for us to work on this problem. We met a lady called Alma who told us that within her own family it was very hard for her to just follow a normal dinner table situation. And I felt very moved by this because in my own family, you know, I always had vivid and rich dinner conversations in sign language. But to be in your own sort of like circle and intimate circle and not having easiness to understand what other people say, that just struck me. And I think from there we really felt like this is something that is worth spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to make better. It turns out that the technology we needed didn't exist at the time, so we were foolish enough to actually say, Hey, we might actually solve it. We talked to the founders of Siri, Shazam, of Google speech as well, and we actually really, you know, made a dent in this. Like we I'm proud to say we were the first company and we still are to provide a group conversation based captioning, which does help a lot of deaf people like face the Thanksgiving dinner syndrome, the situation where a lot of people speak. But we went much beyond this. We just started with this first domino and a lot of others fell as. Consequence of this action.
Carrie: [00:23:39] Yeah. Would have to agree that having individuals and individual people who have experienced the communication challenges firsthand gives you so much more insight into what needs to go into accessibility and programs.
Thibault: [00:23:58] Yeah, and it is an opening, right? It is a first foray in as many ways to approach problems in accessibility. Some people say, Hey, there's a lack of interpreters, let's train more, let's make the scheduling easier. Other people say, hey, you know, let's automate sign language. Other people say, hey, let's, you know, put captions on TV to be better on movies. I think there's a moment where as an entrepreneur, you have to really diagnose and think what is really the first domino and think first principles. You know, my my dream would have been to kind of help on the issues with accessibility. Like I would love everywhere to have an interpreter 24/7 but just cost twice. It's very complicated, right? And in terms of training, it takes time. So there was this way that we could solve and make first steps towards accessibility issues, and that's the way we took in. That brings us now to our hundreds of thousands of people using the app every day.
Carrie: [00:24:55] Yeah, which kind of is a great seque into, you know, you've talked a little bit about AVA and being able to be used, you know, for a group situations and for work and things like that. But can you just maybe dive a little bit deeper into how that is set up and how somebody might utilize that?
Thibault: [00:25:19] Yeah, the key thing is simplicity. You download the app, you go on the website If you need to just be on a Zoom call or Google meet call and you need captions to be your formats and you need to be able to answer and be heard. So you basically download it, create an account and this account is free and this helps you have access to our captions unlimitedly. So you don't have to pay to have captions. Nobody, nobody should have to pay for accessibility. It's really our belief. Now there are situations where your own company, your own school, basically if your students may, you know, have a say and a responsibility in this accessibility. So it's basically, you know, you think about society, not everything all the burden should be on the individual. So we basically propose premium plans like pro plans that are meant to be financed and funded by the organizations you a member of. If you retire, there's a community plan that basically gives you a bit more advanced functions. And those functions could be translation, could be a higher level of captioning that is more adapted to professional settings where you can customize vocabulary, things like this. And this is so that we can create a cross funded model. So basically people who have, you know, a job and a school that can pay for it can basically finance partly obviously like in a lower a lower capacity accessibility and captions for the other people. And I think this is maybe the socialist aspect of being from France. It is really important to think about like accessibility as a common good that we all own and as a community, as a developing community, it is possible to support the captioning of the other members of the community.
Thibault: [00:27:08] You don't always need to do like the fund where the hearing people contribute to it. But when you get your school and your job and your company to provide for it, you know the right level of captions, then you basically in the same time ask for a little contribution for everybody. And that's kind of the same principle for you. It's free. And the point of it is to be always free. And for employers and for schools, they can pay for both the AI version. So that means the automated captions and on top of it the human provided captions too. So this is in the domain of captions. We don't provide interpreters, but we provide captioner which often are good, either complimentary solution or a full solution for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. It could be in a pinch. You don't have time to kind of schedule an interpreter. You can have get captions with our scribe service within 30 seconds in business hours. So that's quite incredible, right? Like I've seen a lot of people wait for weeks or having trouble scheduling a captioner or maybe somebody like cancels last minute. This is very much of a of a great solution for people even who already think they have all the tools. This can actually sort of be really great in a pinch to.
Carrie: [00:28:21] Mm. Yeah, that's a great way to have access quick and to know where to get it. And kind of thinking about it from, you talked a little bit about schools and things like that, but in my job I work with a lot of teenagers who are thinking about going to college or university and may have difficulty in their classes. How did that look for a college or even a high school kind of setup?
Thibault: [00:28:50] Yeah. So college and high school are, you know, hybrid environments. You may have classes online, you may have classes in person. Let's assume there's a variety of situations like amphitheater style and then small class, I would say like, you know, group project style, where, you know, you maybe are like 10 to 15 people around the teacher. So in person, mobile app and computer could be useful online. The computer this helps you basically have captions where the action happens. So when you're in class, we basically, you know, either you're in a small situation, small class and the sound is good and you basically get captions on the computer. So you open our desktop version and the sound basically just goes through into your computer and captions what's being said. You can click in one click, you know, schedule scribes for any of the classes you have upcoming, and then they will show up at the time the class start to make sure there's no like fractions situations where an hour just comes up and you just don't know what the teacher said. So this is, you know, very easy to use in class when you're in an amphitheater and then the voice of the teacher might be a bit further. We actually got your back as well. But you're going to need to get closer to where the person is speaking. So either you go in the first row or you actually connect a simple Bluetooth microphones.
Thibault: [00:30:22] We provide some Bluetooth microphones that range from $30 the units to maybe $100. If you want the higher end quality, you can get your administration or city managers to pay for it. But basically you just go to the teacher and you just, you know, put the microphones either on their lap, on the like as a Clipper microphone or just like in a in a desk next to them if they're kind of stationary. So that helps them just very easily without having to do anything with their phone or mobile app be captured in terms of audio. And you can just get the captions of what is being said in the same time the scribe, which just remind you guys is a is a physical person who's going to be remotely listening to the conversation and captioning it and editing in real time. This person is going to make sure that the accuracy is really high and they're going to hear better through the microphone that you may have next to a teacher. So this is a situation that is a very class oriented situation, but obviously AVA is very useful outside of it. So you may have a cafeteria lunch where you basically discussing with someone and, you know, it might be just a one on one situation. You just put your phone next to you as you're eating and then while you're kind of eating your plate and looking at the person speaking, you can glance over to the screen of the mobile phone to see what you missed.
Thibault: [00:31:38] And this is a very, you know, hands off situation, right? Like you don't need to hold it or anything. It should work. Now when there's 3 or 4 people around the table, I'm really going in the full situation. But that's really those key moments. You actually just show a simple QR code and classmates, even people you don't know who are at the table can basically use a simple camera to scan the QR code and be connected to the conversation without having to download the app. So really, it's just, you know, the same way as we've been ordering during COVID in restaurants. It's just you scan a QR code, it opens a web page, and then what they say is going to appear with their own color on your phone. And I think, you know, that's such a lifesaver. You don't have to sit alone in, you know, cafeteria anymore. You don't have to kind of like nod. And you didn't really understand what your classmate talked about. And I think that's those moments are very formative when you kind of like go to college or even when you're starting university, maybe even the first year. That's where you make friends. That's the first domino where also to make sure it's correctly accommodated for.
Carrie: [00:32:42] Yeah. And so when you were talking about the QR codes and everybody kind of like scanning it, so that does that then make their phone a microphone as well. So it picks up their voices. Okay. Exactly.
Thibault: [00:32:55] So there's one thing that I'll just say very short. It's you are autonomous, you have your own app and you might pick up pretty well, even if there's a lot of background noise and people speaking far away from you. But don't settle for 80 or 90% accuracy, you can boost it by simply sharing to another person at your table. Hey, if you scan your microphone, I'll be able to understand better what you say. How about we do this? That takes 30 seconds, even less. And then this also allows them to be helpful and to accommodate you. And it's not so much of a friction. You may disclose that you have hearing loss in this situation. So this is something that is completely optional. But I would say everybody, even the young people, now use captions for TikTok for Instagram. So why wouldn't they use caption for a conversation with you in person on top of it? It's just cool. It's a new technology, you basically being a super human, having like new ways to to understand the conversation like this. And if you don't want to record it or have it, every trace of it, you can always delete it or choose to not record the information too. So this makes it very private, secure and great for teenagers as well.
Carrie: [00:34:10] Yeah. No, I'm going to have my teenagers try that out at our we have a group meeting or a peer mentorship meeting, and I'm sure they would love to experiment with that and then possibly use it in their everyday life as well. One other topic that I thought we should touch on would be health care and accessibility too, because I think it's important to recognize that every deaf and hard of hearing person does require different accommodations and supports, and we should be asking what they prefer before an appointment. And I don't think that always happens. But yeah. What is your experience been with working with health care facilities to help them be more ready to accommodate different individuals?
Thibault: [00:35:05] Yeah. Let me actually ask you if you care to share, what has been your experience going and I guess it's not the same in your practice versus outside, but what has been your experience on accessibility? And I'd love to talk about mine as well.
Carrie: [00:35:20] What has been my experiences. Yeah. So honestly, it was interesting. I was thinking about this the other day about how unaccessible our, my cochlear implant surgery was because I was in obviously a situation where I wasn't able to hear because I was going in for cochlear implant surgery and everybody had mask on and it was still, you know, right after COVID or I mean, COVID was still happening. So there was, it was very much, um, restricted as far as, you know, not, not being able to see. And I was thinking, wow, it we, they weren't set up at all to have accessibility. And so, you know, in my situation, my husband was my my ears and but they're saying a lot of important medical information to that. He wasn't getting all of that because it's so much coming at you. And so, yeah, it made me think, like as an audiologist, I mean, I work in the schools, but audiologists don't always doing a good job in their own private or clinical practice to make accessibility something, um, just common, I guess I should say that expected, you.
Thibault: [00:36:51] Know, and that's even crazy because you're going for, you know, hearing related surgery and had no accessibility. So the standard today, the state of the art even in the US where I believe the healthcare expenses are the highest, you know, per person. So even in the US, you just have this subpar experience in one of the most stressful situations. And. That's going to change. That's going to really, really change. It tells so much about how unprioritized deaf/hard of hearing people have been and about how in the end it's really down to a question of costs and ability. It's like, you know, probably people don't want to ask the question of how you want to be accommodated because they just don't have the budget for it. If they don't have the budget because the voice of deaf people have not been really heard to fight for decent budget for it. And, you know, it's not to kind of denigrate all the existing policies. They're just not enough. And I think everybody can agree to this. It's they're not enough to just think that you're going to magically provide all the needs and cater to the needs there. You have a lot of deaf/hard of hearing people who are basically coming with a family member, you know, and that's what you did, right.
Thibault: [00:38:06] And so it's like so interesting to see how broken this is. And like, you know, we're not just a health care accessibility company. We are a full sociFinpatient care situation. So there's a few institutions that we're working with, some in France, some in the US, where basically a deaf/hard of hearing experience will be 24 over seven accessible in a hospital. And that is so exciting because that's the future. That's what it should be. It's like.com for a first outpatient experience. Maybe they go to the help desk. The help desk will have a QR code, but this happens today. Already in some places you have this QR code and then the patient basically scan it and then there's a conversation happening with the person at the help desk. Then they know they can download this app that they will use for the rest of the medical staff because sometimes the staff is not equipped or doesn't know about this app. Of course, sometimes it's the first time they discovering somebody who is deaf hard of hearing. But you will have this app that is provided and supported by the institution, right? And we believe this to be the right approach. It's a balance between you bringing what you need, but also the institutions of being equipped. So there's a dance between accessibility and autonomy.
Carrie: [00:40:27] Yeah. And I think that if especially in the field of speech and hearing or audiology or ENT this should just be something that would be available and just on. And we should be asking each one of our patients like would you like to have captioning turned on? And by downloading the AVA app onto an iPad, they could have it accessible within moments.
Thibault: [00:41:00] And what's interesting is that for everyone who says that they had a terrible experience at the hospital, this can end now. And there's two levels of accessibility, right? There's one that is accessibility you bring yourself. Right? It's like when you bring your husband, when you bring like a friend to help the translation, like this is not perfect accessibility, but this is a working accessibility. Obviously this is not to encourage and to kind of call the gold standard. AVA is the same. It's like you bring your captioner with you to make sure this is working for you and on top of it you can, if you want, pay for a scribe, which is a professional captioner to make sure that whatever is coming out of the tool is not AI fully. If you really need a super high quality situation in this situation now, if you come to this hospital, it might be that if you're recurring patient or as you go and then people realize that you're using technologies to accommodate the conversations, they actually will equip themselves with a good standard of accessibility. And that might take more time, which is understandable. But in the same time, it is doable today to solve most of your accessibility issues. And I think a lot of people have a hard time realizing that the day to day can change instantly.
Carrie: [00:42:21] Yeah, no, I hope people who are listening today, if they take one thing from this, is that they have the access and the tools right in front of them in order to do something better for their patients and individuals that they see every day in their those that were.
Thibault: [00:42:41] Thought for them. And from that perspective, the device, I would say the deaf hard of hearing eyes.
Thibault: [00:42:49] Yeah.
Carrie: [00:42:50] So this was a great conversation. But is there anything that I didn't ask you that you would like to share? That I missed.
Thibault: [00:42:59] Well, I mean, I think there's a there's a lot of topics we could talk about. But I think the you know, overall, the idea is that change is now and is in your hands. And there's a time for complaining and saying how broken things are and there's a time for getting your hands dirty and actually giving it a try to all the things that are being sort of created around you. Um, but now what works for other people may not work for you and where other people have stopped at and it could be a situation where people just feel content with, you know, simple automated solutions. You can actually get the flexibility you deserve and you want. And this is really something that, you know, we find ourselves, as I would say, accessibility professionals like you are as well. Um, always playing the role of coaching and helping people feel confident and secure in the society that they didn't really let them feel this way or didn't make it easier. And sometimes they do, and they teach us a lot. But part of our work is also to say, No, you can do it, you can be autonomous yourself. You can take back the reins of your own accessibility and and actually make it happen.
Thibault: [00:44:12] And when you do this fight and this advocacy, I might say other people will thank you because you've made this, you know, hospital that you went to a few times accessible by just raising your voice, being sure you were loud and clear. When you say I need accessibility. So my only last word would be around. Advocacy is self advocacy is absolutely paramount. It doesn't have to be boring. It doesn't have to be, you know, a wall of issues. You can make it sexy. You can make it easy. You can show to people that advocacy is not you telling, hey, you're not being legal and not being compliant, not always sort of bringing the stick. Of course, this is in the backdrop. The stick is important, but you can also also bring the carrot and you can say this is something you can solve easily and we can end today if we just have a bit of a motivation to do so. And so that's what AVA is audio visual accessibility. It's near. It's in your hands. When you download the app and we help you get there.
Carrie: [00:45:13] Well, that was a great way to close our conversation today, and I really appreciate you being a guest and in the show notes, I will link the AVA website so people can link to that and explore all of the different options that you have. And like you said, they can go to wherever they download their apps and find the easy.
Thibault: [00:45:35] Yeah.
Carrie: [00:45:36] Yes. And I also link to TED Talk because I thought the TED talk was just amazing as it went back into your backstory and how you really got to the point of making a difference and actually getting action out of your anger, I guess, in that sense and putting it to good work. So again, thank you for being a guest today. Listener Thank you for listening and please share the EmpowerEAR AudiologyAV podcast with anyone that you think this would be helpful for and we look forward to you coming back with our next episode.
Announcer: [00:46:13] And this has been a production of the 3C Digital Media Network.