Captions and Bluetooth streaming

Two technologies have changed everyday life for people with hearing loss more than almost anything else: captions on nearly every screen, and sound streamed straight into hearing aids. Both skip the room. There's no distance, echo, or background noise between the sound and you, which is exactly what makes speech hard to follow.

Live captions on your phone

Phones can now caption almost any speech they hear, as it happens, on the device itself.

iPhone. Open Settings → Accessibility → Live Captions and turn it on. It captions anything playing on the phone, phone and FaceTime calls, and, with the microphone, people talking around you. Appearance changes the text size and colors. It works on iPhone 11 and later, and isn't available in every country or language.¹

Android. Open Settings → Accessibility → Live Caption. It captions videos, podcasts, phone and video calls, and audio messages. During a phone call, you can also type a reply that the phone reads aloud. Expressive captions add tone and emphasis, and sound labels show things like laughter and applause. It's on Pixel phones and many others. If you don't see it, check with your phone's maker.² For conversations in person, Google's free Live Transcribe app captions the people around you.

On your computer

• Mac: System Settings → Accessibility → Live Captions, on Macs with Apple silicon.³
• Windows 11: press Windows + Ctrl + L, or go to Settings → Accessibility → Captions.⁴
• Chrome, on any computer: Settings → Accessibility → Live Caption. It captions any audio playing in the browser, and the audio never leaves your computer.⁵

Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet have their own captions too, which you turn on in each meeting.

Since September 2026, Apple devices can also generate subtitles for videos that don't have any, from social media clips to home videos. It happens on the device, and it's English-only in the U.S. and Canada for now.⁶

Captions on TV

Closed captions (CC) can be turned on and off, and include sounds as well as speech. Subtitles are often only the dialogue, meant for people who don't know the language. SDH (subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing) are subtitles that add sound descriptions and who's speaking, the way captions do.

In the U.S., nearly all new English and Spanish TV programming must be captioned, and the FCC sets quality standards: captions must be accurate, in sync with the speech, complete from start to finish, and placed so they don't cover important parts of the picture.⁷ Online, the law requires captions on shows that aired on U.S. TV with captions.⁸ Streaming originals aren't covered by that rule, but since the National Association of the Deaf's 2012 settlement with Netflix, the major streaming services caption nearly everything.⁹

Captions can be set in several places: the TV's own menu for broadcast and cable, a streaming box like Apple TV, Roku, or Fire TV, and the CC button inside each streaming app. Most let you change the size, font, and background, and a solid background behind larger text is often much easier to read. Since August 2026, an FCC rule requires TVs, set-top boxes, and other video devices sold in the U.S. to make those settings easy to find, close to where captions are turned on, with a preview, and remembered once you set them.¹⁰

Live TV, like news and sports, is captioned as it happens, by a person or by software, so those captions run a few seconds behind and have more errors than captions for prerecorded shows.

Streaming to hearing aids

With streaming, calls, music, videos, and TV go straight from a phone or TV into both hearing aids, shaped by the hearing aids' own settings for your hearing. It's clearer than holding a phone to one ear, and it doesn't compete with the noise of the room.

It used to take extra hardware. Phones had to work with a hearing aid's telecoil (T-coil), a tiny receiver that picks up a magnetic signal, or you wore a separate streamer around your neck that took the phone's Bluetooth and relayed it to the hearing aids. Today most hearing aids stream directly, in one or more of these ways:

LE Audio is the newest standard, designed for hearing aids and low power use, and it's what makes Auracast possible. As of iOS 27, iPhone works with MFi and Bluetooth Classic hearing aids but doesn't support LE Audio hearing aids or Auracast.¹⁴ Recent Samsung Galaxy and Pixel phones support both.¹⁵

Pairing with an iPhone: open Settings → Accessibility → Hearing Devices and follow the prompts.¹⁶ The same screen, and the Hearing control in Control Center, let you change volume and presets. Live Listen turns the iPhone into a remote microphone: set it on a table or hand it to someone, and their voice streams to your hearing aids.¹⁷

Pairing with Android: open Settings → Accessibility → Hearing devices → Pair new device for ASHA and LE Audio hearing aids. Bluetooth Classic hearing aids pair like any other Bluetooth device, under Connected devices → Pair new device.¹⁸

Hearing aids usually go into pairing mode for a few minutes after they're turned on or taken out of the charger. The exact steps vary, so check the instructions for your model.

TV straight to your hearing aids

Most hearing aid makers sell a TV streamer, a small box connected to the TV's audio output that sends TV sound straight to their own hearing aids. It works only with that brand, but it's built for very low delay, often under 20 milliseconds,¹⁹ so voices stay in sync with lips and don't echo against the TV's speakers. Everyone else can keep listening through the speakers at their usual volume.

Auracast does the same thing with a standard any brand can use. Some recent TVs, including LG and Samsung models, can broadcast their sound over Auracast to LE Audio hearing aids and earbuds, and several people can listen at once, each at their own volume.²⁰ Public places are starting to use it too, like airports, theaters, and lecture halls. On newer Android phones, you join a broadcast from the hearing device settings, and on some Pixel phones, by scanning a QR code.¹⁵