About Us
Our purpose
Capption was conceived in a moment of frustrating indignity. While on an early spring date night, our visually-impaired founder, Sherman Bausch, stood in front of an ancient bronze vessel in a nationally-reknowned gallery, eager to understand its significance. Unfortunately, the bronze’s information label stood partially behind it, blocked by bollards, another exhibit, and visitors—none of which Sherman could risk bumping into. He was shut out.
“Why can’t I just get this on my phone right here, right now? Can’t someone fix this?”
He could. So he did.
Capption’s driven by a singular mission: making curiosity accessible for everyone. Every visitor deserves a dignified, effortless experience learning about inspirational works at museums, galleries, parks, nature centers, public areas, sacred spaces, and commercial venues.
Unlike every mainstream content delivery mechanism, Capption is a purpose-built assistive technology that shatters specific barriers and fosters deeper connections to stories that inspire.
Our perspective
One word encapsulates the human truth of Capption’s effect on an exhibit visitor’s experience: dignity.
How accessibility should work
Accessibility should bridge gaps between an exhibitor’s intended experience and all their visitors’ actual experiences. Accessibility solutions should also recognize that disability exists on a spectrum. Not all people with low vision are blind, for example, and most disabled people aren’t obviously disabled. None desire special treatment.
Typical exhibit accessibility efforts solve accessibility’s external problems like legibility, translation, or media delivery. However, meaningful exhibit accessibility alters visitor perception and perspective, solving the internal problems that make or break their experience.
Design for dignity
Capption does not merely solve obvious external problems. Instead, Capption intentionally mitigates underserved visitors’ internal problems: the stresses generated by coping with access barriers. We improve the exhibit experience by relieving social, emotional, and physical stresses that can snowball into a exhausting bad time.
All visitors deserve to grasp the same knowledge with the same agency as those privileged with ability. Each Capption feature must create an internal affective, behavioral, or cognitive gain for a real-world exhibit-goer. Someone encountering a new place, squinting, stooping, navigating crowds, managing kids, and feeling sore while they explore their interest.
Our people
Nearly every Capption team member lives with both the insatiable curiosity of an exhibit visitor and a disability that creates a stressor Capption was built to remove. All of us are 20+ year digital veterans now gleefully unconstrained by the orthodoxies, poor thinking, and perverse incentives that make software experiences suck. It feels great to do good right.
Our partners
Although Capption provides multiple layers of practical value, Capption’s best partners share one or both of these traits:
- A deep concern for the visitor experience
- A calling to improve access and inclusion
Sound like you? Please join us to cultivate a future where every visitor feels connected, served, and inspired.