Lip reading Awareness Week 2015

Lipreading and raising the profile of hearing loss

This week is Lipreading Awareness Week 2015, which is a great opportunity to highlight one of the challenges that those with hearing loss or a degree of deafness deal with every day.

Lip-reading requires a lot of concentration, and is a hard skill to master for those who have recently been diagnosed with hearing loss. It involves understanding what people are saying by observing the speaker’s lip movements, a significant communication tool for those with little or no hearing. There are over 10 million people in the UK with hearing loss, which is about 1 in 6 of the population.

Numerous organisations have been promoting Lipreading Awareness Week 2015. Age UK Hearing Aids produced this lip-reading quiz so that those who don’t rely on it can test their skills and see how challenging it can be. Of course, the quiz environment does not reflect what it’s like to lip-read all the time as you can see the same sentence repeated multiple times. In reality there is little or no time to reflect on what has just been said; lip-reading has to happen in real time. Lipreading is also more effective in a one-to-one situation, whereas larger events or situations will need to have hearing loops installed for those with hearing aids, or a captioning service such as what is offered by 121 Captions.

The Association of Teachers of Lipreading to Adults (ATLA) are also running a number of taster sessions during the week, which you can find out more about here.