Speech-Reading

The practice of understanding spoken language by visually interpreting the movements of the lips, face, tongue, and jaw of the speaker, along with contextual cues such as facial expressions and body language. Many deaf and hard of hearing people use speech-reading as one of several strategies for understanding spoken communication, often in combination with residual hearing, hearing aids, or captioning. Speech-reading is inherently imperfect — many speech sounds look identical on the lips (such as "p", "b", and "m"), and research suggests that even skilled speech-readers typically understand only 30-40% of words through vision alone. Factors like speaker distance, lighting, facial hair, and whether the speaker faces the listener significantly affect success. In meetings with ASR captioning, DHH users may speech-read alongside reading captions to supplement their understanding.