Evolution of a hard-of-hearing person with technology

I’m Florian Margaine, Field CTO at Upsun, with profound hearing loss since birth. My primary job is to help our teams collaborate better in order to solve our customers’ problems. An ironic position given my disability.

In this personal presentation, I share six technological advancements that transformed my career over 15 years: hearing aids, subtitles, text-based communication, Bluetooth connectivity, live captions, and smart glasses.

These technologies increased my comprehension from 30% to 90-100% in meetings, enabling me to thrive in a fully remote company for 11 years. But here’s the challenge: we have the technology, yet accessibility is rarely the default.

I’ll demonstrate how accessibility features benefit everyone (subtitles in noisy environments, text communication for time zones, searchable captions), and provide three concrete actions developers can take tomorrow to make technology more inclusive. Every developer choice either includes or excludes 15% of users. Choose inclusion.