Live captions, sign language and audio description for events, booked as one
TL;DR Openrow is an access desk that event organisers hire for a show, conference or festival. It delivers live captions to phones and screens, books Indian Sign Language interpreters, and adds audio description for selected performances. Organisers pay per event day. It works if corporate and government event budgets treat access as a line item.
Census 2011 counted 26.8 million disabled people in India, and 18.9% of them had a hearing disability and 18.8% a seeing disability[1]. So how well do live events serve them? Badly. At the Purple Fest at Rashtrapati Bhavan in March 2025, a festival meant for disabled people, a writer with hearing loss found no captions for the videos or the President's speech. Organisers offered a sign language interpreter instead, which does not help someone who reads captions rather than signs[2]. Even broadcast rules leave a gap, as the 2021 draft accessibility standards for TV exempted live sports, live music and award shows[3].
Openrow sells a booked service, not an app for fans. For each event it does four things. It runs an access check on the venue and running order a week ahead. On the day, it takes the stage audio feed and delivers live captions, machine-generated and corrected by a human captioner, to attendees' phones through a link and to a screen beside the stage. It sends a trained Indian Sign Language interpreter for sessions where deaf attendees have asked for one. For theatre and selected shows, it provides live audio description through earphones.
The seed pitched personalised real-time experiences for everyone, which sounds nice on paper, but the organiser controls the audio feed, the stage and the budget. A fan-side app without the organiser's feed cannot caption a show well. So Openrow starts with English and Hindi captions, then adds other languages as captioners are trained. Attendees pick what they need when they register.
The user is a deaf, hard-of-hearing, blind or low-vision attendee. The payer is the organiser. The first buyers are corporate conference teams with inclusion targets, government departments running public events, and festivals that want to be known as accessible. Pricing would be per event day, around ₹25,000–80,000 depending on hours, languages and interpreters (our estimate). For comparison, one US captioning app charges individuals US$14.99 a month (about ₹1,450) for premium captions[4].
The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016 has been in force since 2017[5], and public events are being called out when they fall short[2]. The government's sign language centre now runs an interpreter diploma and keeps a public directory of interpreters[6], so there is a pool to book from. Speech recognition for Indian English and Hindi has also become usable as a first draft for a human to correct.
There is no public figure for spending on access services at Indian events. Volume is the clearer signal, with about 34,000 shows in 2025 by the biggest ticketing app's count[7], before counting conferences and government events. As adjacent context, India's live entertainment sector passed ₹12,000 crore in 2024[8]. Openrow's market is a thin slice of either.
In India there's no company we could find selling captions, sign language and audio description together to organisers, and disability groups usually arrange them case by case. One theatre-access app, owned by a large theatre group, sends captions and audio description to phones in Broadway theatres[9]. A US captioning app sells AI captions with human correction and sign language for events in the US[4]. The gap is a single Indian supplier that handles all three in Indian languages.
| Difficulty | Moderate (38/100) |
| Starting capital | ₹40–75 L |
| Time to launch | 4–6 months |
The technology is available. The hard part is people - trained captioners who can correct Hindi and English at speech pace, interpreters available on a given evening in a given city, and describers for theatre. Sales are hard too, because access is often the first budget line cut.
No licence is needed to provide access services. The law matters more as the reason buyers pay than as a permit you need.
Building this outside India? The categories above usually have a local equivalent, so check with your own regulator.
Don't trust AI captions unchecked in a noisy venue, and don't use AI avatars in place of sign language interpreters. Deaf and blind attendees will judge you on accuracy, so a person stays in the loop on every session.
Want to work out the AI layer for Openrow? Talk to Yash →
I see this as a service business for a founder with ties to the deaf or blind community and some event-production experience. It will not scale like software, and anyone who wants that should look elsewhere. First prove that 10 organisers will pay for access at a second event after trying it once.
Plan for roughly ₹40–75 L, mostly captioners, interpreter bookings, equipment and the sales effort before organisers budget for access.
No licence. Use qualified ISL interpreters, comply with the DPDP Act for attendee data and register the company and GST as usual.
Yes. Most countries have disability rights law and a shortage of event access suppliers. Check local interpreter certification and data rules first.
The free Openrow validation kit has the line-by-line capital breakdown, the effort scoring, the disability-law and data checklist, a 14-day validation sprint with pass/fail targets, a 90-day launch plan, 10 interview questions for organisers, and 5 assumptions to test. Download the kit →
Thinking about building Openrow or something close to it? The make-or-break work is building a reliable bench of captioners and interpreters before you sell. If you need a hand, you know where to find me. Talk to Yash →
For illustration only. Names are fictional and ideas hypothetical; sourced facts are real but may be out of date. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice, and Yash Khatri is not personally liable for any use of it. Read the full disclaimer.