As someone who’s profoundly deaf myself, another less technical approach is to install Rogue Amoeba’s Loopback, and use it to pipe audio from a given app into a tool like Google Meet or Otter.ai using the Loopback device as the audio source. This effectively provides real time captions for anything running on your existing machine.
The nice thing about Chrome feature is you can move the caption box around and keep it in the foreground while doing other things, although styling options seem limited (the text might be a little small for some).
[1] on desktop, not sure about mobile
[2] via chrome://settings/accessibility -> Live Caption
Additionally, it supports multiple languages (only one at a time sadly), so I also use it for Japanese captions and it's equally great there.
The extent of the effort being getting their employee a slightly-more-expensive-than-average tool that would enable them to do their job better regardless of the disability?
Such inclusive, much pat-yourself-on-the-back, wow.
"We gave our woodworking shop employee a quality saw so that they'd make their own accessibility ramps!"
That is literally grounds for a lawsuit.
>so yes, making an effort to support an employee’s disability and their needs is worth recognizing.
...if the effort were actually made. Which is not the case.
Merely being compliant with the law is a very low bar, and we should recognize that they did not do anything beyond what the ADA requires them to.
Why instead? They didn't a bad thing, just nothing beyond what the law requires.
A simple answer for you, BTW:
Pay a student $15/hr to transcribe all meetings in real time for the employee.
Or pay money to professionals in the field to set up a solution. You know, people who get paid to do just that.
Jesus.
But hearing loss does not impair standing up servers and software. They can pay the employee who probably is the expert at this, the guy with the hearing loss, or go task Emil to go do it to ... avoid 'appearances'?
Aaaaaaaaand who said they paid him?
Not the OP, for sure. It seems like the disabled person set the system up in their own time to help the company communicate with him in meetings.
>or go task Emil to go do it to ... avoid 'appearances'?
They could hire Emil to live-transcribe the speech into text.
They could hire the services of a professional company that would set up speech recognition for their meetings.
They could have done a lot of things.
What they did is nothing. Gee, a software company gave their employee a laptop, how totally unheard of!
Why are people here so willing to pass this off as some act of charity?