Our Story

2013-2020

James & Chris met in 2013 at a workshop, instead of listening to what was being presented, they spent their time building a tool which allows teachers to import their schedule into Google Calendar. Since then they have spent their time tinkering and making cool stuff, from home automation, to large commercial products. They have been featured in Magazine articles, the Google for Education blog for Global Accessibility Awareness Day and presented at conferences across North America.

2020-2023

During the 2020-21 school year Chris started to teach a student with hearing loss, and realised that the world is not an accessible place for students with hearing loss. From fire alarms, to morning announcements, assemblies and theatrical productions, many aspects of school life was inaccessible. Chris and James came up with SlidesCaptions, a Google Chrome extension which allows users to remove the slides from Google Slides, and turn the inbuilt captioning tool full screen, they realised that this was not a long term solution, and needed more work. Life was busy and time was short. In the meantime, Chris undertook other projects such as spearheading the implementation of an Assistive Listening System in his High School Auditorium, creating a blog with Tracey, called Listening Accessability and developing a mountain of resources which can be found on our resources page.

2023-2024

In 2023 Chris was sent an email by his then Assistant Director of Information Systems telling him about the the opportunity to take part in the first ever Dell Education Innovation Accelerator. He was accepted, and using experience from both the Innovation Accelerator and the Google Innovation Academy, Zip Captions was born. Since then what was a dream to make the classroom more accessible for students with hearing loss, has turned into a tool used by over 1000 users. Our tools are used by individuals, places of worship and entire school districts to name but a few.

Solutions Zip (Operating as Zip Captions and Zip Solutions) is a registered business in Quebec.

If you want to learn more, or want to talk to us, get in touch

Zip Solutions products are built with ❤️ near Montreal, Canada.