Lisa Burger is the executive director of London’s National Theatre. This year, under her direction London’s National Theatre introduced smart glasses for audience members who are hard of hearing, allowing them to read subtitles while watching plays. The technology behind the glasses was developed as a result of a collaboration between the theatre’s technical team and speech experts led by Professor Andrew Lambourne. The National Theatre had struggled to make plays accessible to people with hearing impairments, due to the fact that there were only a limited number of captioned performances for each production. The free glasses, which took two years to develop with Accenture, have text running on their lenses that audience members can read in real time. Audience members who were hard of hearing had to sit in specially designated seats only available for certain performances, now, with the glasses, they can sit wherever they want. Later this year The National Theatre will make the technology available to other U.K. venues, and Burger hopes that eventually the technology will spread internationally.

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