TCS Research and Innovation
TCS Research
TCS Research: Inventing to build sustainable futures
Highlights
- Communication barriers often emerge not because people lack the ability to communicate, but because systems continue to prioritise speech and text over the many ways humans interact with the world.
- Hearing loss is not a single experience. Deaf, hard-of-hearing and DeafBlind individuals may use different languages, modalities and communication practices, each requiring distinct forms of access and support.
- Inclusive communication begins with recognising sign languages as complete natural languages and designing services that support people in their preferred language and mode of communication.
- AI has the potential to expand communication access across spoken, signed, written and tactile interactions, but meaningful progress depends on accuracy, human oversight and community participation.
- Communication access is not simply an accessibility consideration. It is a prerequisite for participation, independence and equitable access to education, employment, healthcare and essential services.
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What makes communication access essential?
Imagine you are visiting a new place where the transport signage is in Braille, the doctor's directions are in sign language, the classroom lectures are in a local language, and the announcements are hard to hear. Communication has suddenly become a barrier for you. What may feel like a temporary communication barrier in an unfamiliar environment is a daily experience for many individuals around the world.
Communication is something most of us take for granted, yet it is one of the fundamental human needs, and diverse human languages are unique to our species. Language enables people to think, express ideas, learn, work, build relationships, and participate meaningfully in society.
People can communicate through many languages and modalities, including spoken, signed, written and tactile forms of communication. However, almost all essential communication channels are still largely designed around speech and text. When services are designed primarily for speech and text, millions of people encounter barriers not because of their abilities, but because communication systems fail to accommodate diverse ways of interacting with the world.
Why is hearing loss not a one-size-fits-all experience?
According to the World Health Organisation, more than 430 million people worldwide currently live with disabling hearing loss, and it is projected to exceed 700 million by 2050, approximately one in every ten people globally.
While these figures show the scale of hearing loss globally, they reveal little about the diversity of communication needs, identities and lived experiences within these communities, since hearing disability is not a homogenous condition. People may be partially deaf, profoundly deaf, deaf from birth or become deaf later in life.
Some people are identified as hard of hearing, while others are identified as Deaf with a capital “D”, thus belonging to a linguistic and cultural community formed around shared experiences rather than a medical condition. There are people with multiple disabilities such as deafblindness, which is more complex than addition of deafness and blindness. A DeafBlind person’s experiences are significantly different than those by a Deaf person or a Blind person.
This diversity means that communication needs, preferences and access requirements vary widely, requiring more than a one-size-fits-all approach to accessibility.
Are current systems inclusive enough for diverse communication needs?
As spoken languages dominate communication channels, Deaf and DeafBlind people encounter barriers in everyday situations. Picture three people going into the same bank.
The first is a young Deaf professional who uses sign language as their primary language. The second person lost their hearing later in life and now depends on captions and lip-reading. The third is DeafBlind and communicates through touch. All three need the same service. But each interacts with the world differently.
- The first customer without sign-language support may struggle to understand account options, ask questions, or make informed financial decisions independently.
- The second customer, without accurate captions or assistive technology support, may miss important details about transactions, fees, or instructions, making the visit frustrating and error-prone.
- The third customer without tactile communication support may be unable to communicate with bank staff at all, creating a complete barrier to accessing important banking services.
Yet many organisations still provide only spoken communication, leaving some customers dependent on companions, interpreters or workarounds to access the same service.
Exclusions are not due to the limitations of the individual but due to the absence of a system that supports diversity of needs. This affects academic achievements, career progress, privacy, safety, independence and self-confidence. People are left behind because the systems are not inclusive by design. True inclusion requires communication access that supports people in their preferred language and modality.
What are the biggest misconceptions about accessible communication?
Many efforts to improve accessibility begin with good intentions. However, communication access is often approached through broad assumptions that do not fully reflect the diversity of languages, modalities and communication practices used by Deaf and DeafBlind individuals.
Firstly, sign languages are not gestures or visual forms of spoken language, rather they are complete natural languages. We have over 300 sign languages worldwide, including American Sign Language (ASL), British Sign Language (BSL), and Indian Sign Language (ISL), and they contain distinct grammar, vocabulary, and cultural identities. For many Deaf individuals, sign language is a first language (L1). Meaning is conveyed through linguistic features such as handshape, movement, location and facial expression, just as spoken languages rely on changes in sounds to distinguish one word from another.
Secondly, although captions and written text are essential, they do not always provide complete accessibility. Reading may be challenging for some Deaf individuals because reading a piece of text requires processing of orthography to phonology association which might be difficult for a Deaf learner. Moreover, text cannot fully convey the spatial, visual, and non-manual information of signing like facial expression, eye gaze, and body posture. They may mark questions, topicalisation, negation, conditionals, adverbial information, participant roles, prosodic boundaries, and discourse perspective.
Thirdly, lip-reading, or speechreading depends heavily on contextual cues, facial expressions, linguistic prediction, topic familiarity, and any residual hearing to infer meaning, and hence cannot provide complete access to spoken communication. Its effectiveness decreases in challenging conditions such as poor lighting, masks, side-facing speakers, low-quality video, unfamiliar terms or accents, multiple speakers.
How should AI support inclusive communication?
Supporting diverse communication needs at scale remains a significant challenge for organisations, particularly in emergency, education, healthcare, and workplace settings where we observe a scarcity of trained human interpreters.
AI is creating new opportunities to support communication across spoken, signed, written and tactile interactions, helping extend access in situations where human support is not immediately available. However, technology alone cannot address every communication need. Human interpreters, lived experience, and community expertise are essential to ensuring communication is accurate, meaningful and contextually appropriate.
Developing AI for sign language is far more complex than translating speech or text. Sign languages convey meaning through movement, facial expressions, spatial relationships and cultural context, all of which are key parts of the language itself. Supporting communication effectively requires AI systems that can interpret these linguistic features reliably rather than treating sign language as a direct visual representation of spoken language.
The challenge becomes even greater for DeafBlind communication. Approaches such as Protactile depend on touch, movement and spatial awareness, requiring advances in multimodal sensing, haptics and human-centred design. Supporting these forms of communication will require AI systems that can operate across multiple modes of interaction rather than relying solely on vision or speech.
As a result, many current AI systems still face limitations in accuracy, context awareness and reliability. In high-risk situations such as healthcare, legal services, banking and emergency response, mistakes can affect safety, privacy and trust.
AI solutions must be developed in partnership with Deaf and DeafBlind communities, with strong governance, transparency, human oversight and rigorous validation. The goal is not to replace people, but to expand communication opportunities, increase independence and make inclusion more accessible at scale.
Building a future of accessible communication for all
Why should leaders invest now in inclusive communication?
Organisations commonly approach accessibility as a social responsibility issue. While that is important, communication access is also a commercial, operational and strategic priority. Deaf and DeafBlind people are consumers, staff members, learners, entrepreneurs, citizens and innovators. When communication barriers persist, organisations risk limiting participation, reducing trust and creating friction across customer and employee experiences.
The World Health Organization estimates that unaddressed hearing loss results in an annual global cost of almost $1 trillion. Beyond economic impact, communication barriers can affect access to education, employment, healthcare and essential services.
Communication barriers do not arise because people communicate differently. They arise when communication systems are designed for only a limited range of languages and modalities. Inclusive communication begins by recognising and supporting that diversity.
The organisational response must be more than just deploying technology. Organisations should make their services accessible by design, offer a suite of communication channels, engage Deaf and DeafBlind users in design and testing, put governance and quality controls in place, and assess outcomes such as service accessibility, user satisfaction, effectiveness of resolution and rates of participation.
Ultimately, accessibility is not about helping people adapt to systems. It is about designing systems around the languages, cultures and communication practices people use to engage with the world. Genuine inclusion begins when communication access is viewed through the lens of the accessibility paradigm, not as a privilege or accommodation, but as a fundamental human right to enhance quality of life.