One evening when I was a child, back when everything seemed to be paneled in faux-wood (station wagons, caption decoder boxes, cereal, Michael Jackson, et cetera), my parents sat me in front of a crime drama because they heard one of the guest characters was deaf.  I don’t know if the actress was deaf; Hollywood likes hearing folks playing deaf for some reason, but I remember her some twenty years later because of her show of grandiose, stupendous, po-wahs of Deafness.  The actress’ character helped some officers solve a crime by reading the lips of witnesses dithering about on a security feed.  Security feeds aren’t fantastic now.  Imagine what they looked like paneled in faux-wood.  

For days after, I tried my hardest to read the lips of everyone on T.V..  I figured that were I successful, I’d eventually be able to parlay a career in the C.I.A. (He says he’ll pick up the intel from Ivan Ivanivanovich at noon), or at least be able to do a neat party trick.  Sadly, I never was able to learn how to read the lips of folks on T.V..  The cognitive leap between two and three dimensions was too much for me.

Hearing people, when meeting the visually-language inclined, tend to ask whether or not the latter can read lips.  The culturally involved and politically aware among we Deaf recoil at that question, but I’m able to understand why hearing people ask that.  Deaf Savants in popular culture have barely decipherable speech and miraculous abilities to read the lips of everyone they meet, regardless of distance, gender, and facial ornaments-slash-tics.  This quintessential Deaf being becomes the basis of comparison for all met Deaf individuals.  Of course there’s also the innate desire to communicate in the easiest way possible - speech.  That the Deaf person may not be able to speak back typically doesn’t faze the Hearing person.  They’re going to deliver their message and damn all forms of discourse to hell.  Having someone do anything more than receive a message is so gee-golly tiring.  

The average deaf person can speech-read (the proper and formal name of lip-reading).  But speech reading is a hard acquired skill with practitioners scattered across the expertise spectrum.  There exist deaf people with godly powers of speech reading, able to catch diphthongs and monophthongs, without the aid of coffee in the morning (I wish to kiss their eyes so that I might be able to acquire some of that awesomeness), and there wander others who couldn’t read even the luscious, artificially enhanced flesh-ages of Angelina Jolie.  The rest of us scatter across the bell curve depending on the time of day, the amount of light, the particulars of the lips being read, and the available holy powers of a sacrificed chicken.

Speech reading is hard work.  Most of us who do it spent hundreds of hours in speech therapy, often at the expense of other learning.  Hearing people don’t seem to care if a deaf child has a well-rounded education.  Many deaf adults don’t know their asshole from a hole in the ground, but jeepers they can sorta read lips.  That’ll get them a six-figure job, an apartment in Manhattan, and a hybrid car!

Sarcasm aside, the technical aspects of speech reading is what trips most readers.  In the best of all possible conditions (lighting, speech clarity, availableness of sacrificed holy chicken), consonants and vowels can be mistaken for each other.  Consider /p/ and /b/.  Can “Bob” be differentiated from “Pub?”  Can you catch “Cap” instead of “Cab?”  Now string together the unlimited variations afforded to us through almost a million unique words in the English language.  The semantics of a sentence are so sensitive to word choice.  Misunderstanding a single word can throw off an entire concept, leaving the speech reader abandoned on some lonely English-language created environment.

Even more insidiously, some languages are tonal rather than phonetically based.  Gives me the shivers to think about what Deaf people in those countries are forced to do.  Shivers!

Human quirks make speech reading harder than it ought to be.  I’ve categorized some of the more typical ones I’ve met in my short career as an Earth wanderer.  

The over-enunciator   This lovely specimen of hearing person believes the best way to ameliorate the speech reading abilities of a Deaf conversationalist is to s l o w l y  s p e a k  a n d  e m p h a s i z e  h e r  l i p  m o v e m e n t s.  While I appreciate her effort, I find the sight of that little dangly thing at the back of her neck peeking out between every aguishly formed consonant a bit distracting.  The speaker making a fool of herself in public usually can keep my attention, for only a few seconds longer.  Plus, having a conversation in slow-mo can be aggravating.

The under-enunciator  Years of speech therapy taught me that lips are a vital part of the speech process.  They help form sounds by doing lovely things to sound waves.  So, for the life of me, I cannot figure out how the hell people talk without moving their lips much.  Are they mumbling?  Are they projecting sound through some kind of psychic manipulation of the surrounding air?  If so, how the heck do they expect me to read their non-existent lip movements?

The adorned lips   Men with what looks like a dead muskrat on their upper and lower lips expect me to be able to read what they haven’t seen since their last shave.  I’m super, but not that super.

Now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t   I bar-tended for a short bit, in the years before Obama was a state senator.  My nights there still provide fresh fodder for all kinds of stories.  A favorite ends with my ass nearly being kicked by some pissed off boyfriend.  I grabbed his girlfriend’s face because I tired of her habit of turning away from me while talking.  She must’ve done that about three or four times before I gracefully introduced her chin to my grip.  Hearing people truly amaze me some times.

The peek-a-boo lips   Seriously, people, if you want me to lip read, stop covering your lips with your hands.  I cannot emphasize that enough.  

The disbeliever   I don’t need to show you my audiogram to prove that I’m deaf.  I really do need to read your lips in order to communicate with you effectively.  This really isn’t up for argument.  If you grunt in frustration and walk away from me again I will gently remove your ovaries/testicles.  And, I say this with a lot of love and good karma.  

All things considered, speech reading taxes users mentally.  I can’t do it for more than a couple of minutes at a stretch.  Some readers do it longer.  Quite a few shorter.  Readers are expected to do their hoo-doo for considerable stretches of time.  I’ve had hearing friends yell at me for being obviously distracted after a few minutes into a lengthily sermon or story.  Usually I’m able to explain that my attention span doesn’t extend past good cleavage or a few minutes – whichever happens by first.  In the old days, back when deaf children were beat for using their hands (not too long ago, actually), some deaf children were required to speech read daylong lectures.  Understandably, very few did well in school.

These days, educators and theorists debate the role of speech reading in deaf education.  Oralists firmly believe that speech reading is a vital skill, perhaps more important than knowing history and math; whereas Manualists (educators that prefer using visual language) feel that the speech reading should be diminished in favor of written communication skills.  Speech reading is difficult.  Using a pen and paper (or netbooks, or cellphones) can be easier.  Recent research shows that basic speech reading skills correlates with increased orthographic (spelling) abilities.  A deaf person that understands the concepts of speech reading can write, which in itself is not surprising since the English language is phonetic.  The largest question remains on how much time and resources does an educator devote to speech reading at the expense of other subjects.  I went for a few hours a week.  Got a few memories upstairs of being pulled out of class and resenting missing out on all the exciting things my friends were learning, while I had to spend a half hour groping the prominent hairs of the old speech therapist’s throat.  

With the difficulties inherent in speech reading being exhausting even on good days (chicken, etc), it’s tempting to ask all hearing people who expect me to speech read if they can hand read.

What?  You can’t?  Awesome. Lets rock the pen and paper.

Jon’s Tips of Pure Loveliness

If you ever find yourself communicating with a deaf person who is speech-reading, the following Tips of Pure Loveliness will make everyone’s lives easier.  

1.    Don’t stand too close.  The speech reader doesn’t need to admire the pretty coffee-stains on your teeth.

2.    Don’t stand too far.  Speech reading is a 3-dimensional game.  The further you are, the more flat your lips.

3.    Make sure there’s plenty of light.  Can you read letters in the dark?  No?  Right-yo, I can’t either.  Lips are harder.

4.    Speak normally.  The idea is to have as normal a conversation as possible.  Anything else is condescending and frustrating.  But do try to enunciate a bit.

5.    Don’t panic.  Deaf people can smell fear.  We feast off it, slowly growing stronger and scarier.