Lip Reading - Difficulties

Difficulties

Other difficult scenarios in which to speechread include:

  • Lack of a clear view of the speaker's lips. This includes obstructions such as moustaches or hands in front of the mouth; the speaker's head turned aside or away, and a bright back-lighting source such as a window behind the speaker, darkening the face.
  • Group discussions, especially when multiple people are talking in quick succession.

Speechreading may be combined with cued speech; one of the arguments in favor of the use of cued speech is that it helps develop lip-reading skills that may be useful even when cues are absent, i.e., when communicating with non-deaf, non-hard of hearing people.

To quote from Dorothy Clegg's 1953 book The Listening Eye, "When you are deaf you live inside a well-corked glass bottle. You see the entrancing outside world, but it does not reach you. After learning to lip read, you are still inside the bottle, but the cork has come out and the outside world slowly but surely comes in to you." This view is relatively controversial within the deaf world; for an incomplete history of this debate, see manualism and oralism.

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