Grrl Power #1315 - Gotta caption 'em all

Thank you for the support! You guys are awesome!

Happy almost Xmas! For those of you who partake. 

I guess I jumped the gun talking about subtitles under the last page. Oh well. I do personally find it almost impossible not to read subtitles... or just captioning really, when they're on the screen. When I'm at my parent's house, the captioning is always on, cause my dad had a cochlear implant, and my mom needs hearing aids now too. So does my sister. I seemed to dodge the worst of it. My hearing seems to be about average for my age, with one or two frequencies being weaker than others. I kind of want to go get hearing aids though. I've been wearing glasses since early high school, so why not add to my gear. Plus I'm an audiophile in the sense that I appreciate really good audio, but refuse to be a twat about the supposed superiority of vinyl and am also unwilling to spend proper audiophile money on gear. The problem with audio gear, and probably literally any gear oriented hobby is that there's cheap gear that gets the job done but is obviously inferior but costs like $8-20, good gear that lacks any obvious drawbacks that usually lands in the $40-$90 range, "pro" gear that's quite good and jumps up to the $250-400 area, and then there's a vast gulf to the "phile" gear, that starts costing like $8,000 up to, and let's be honest, there's virtually no upper limit. I saw an audio setup for listening to computer audio that was around $45,000 dollars. The thing is, most people can tell the difference between the $40 pair of headphones and the $250. Fewer people can tell the difference between the $250 and the $400. Sure, maybe the build quality is nicer, but I'm talking about just the audio. Above that, you have to spend excessively to really, actually tell the difference, and some of that is just going to be placebo. Diminishing returns and all that. I once got a subscription to Tidal, which is basically Spotify, but they offer studio master quality uncompressed audio, and whether it was my admittedly quite nice gaming headphones (but not $4,000 headphones running through a $10,000 DAC) or my Mark 1 earballs, I just couldn't hear the difference. 

What the hell was I talking about. Oh, hearing aids. I might look into a pair, because honestly it's hard to know what you're missing. 

I'm positive you could make a shirt with modern doodads that did what Dabbler's do. They've invented pretty flexible screens. I don't think it'd look like fabric, but maybe some ziplock pouch on the front of the shirt with a removable screen for easy washing? Hook that up to a smartphone listening and doing text to speech? I've also seen hats and shirts that have led lights on them. I don't mean flashlights, but low res screens. Or just general illumination, like this. Easy. The trick would be making it only TtS the person wearing the shirt, so you don't have a jumble of overlapping nonsense on the shirt or people sneaking up behind the person and saying stuff like "I planned 9/11." or "My dad can molest your dad." or whatever. Restricting it to the wearer probably wouldn't be too hard, really. If they have AI that can kind of blandly imitate voices, someone should be able to rig up an AI that can filter and identify voices pretty well. Failing that, some sort of mouth bilocation tracking could work. I think most smartphones only have one mic, but speakers and mics are basically the same thing. I'd be surprised if someone couldn't figure out a way to use the speakers and mic in concert to echolocate. And failing that, the shirt could have a built in lavalier mic that plugs into the phone via the same cable that runs the screen. It'd be great if you had a friend who was hard of hearing and always forgot to put in his hearing aids. But then you could much more easily just have a hand gesture that meant "Put in your ears, Steve."