As a hard-of-hearing person, I extensively rely on seeing others’ faces, especially lips, to be able to follow the conversation with them. However, noise distorts this magic skill. Attempting to lipread in noisy places is like carrying my niece in one hand and holding my nephew's hand in the other while crossing a crowded street.

Uly asked me a really good question about lipreading and noise in my latest post.

"Just out of curiosity, if you're lip-reading and can hear the noise anyway, why does it matter if it's noisy?"

I didn’t know the answer right away. After getting great insights from members of a hearing loss forum and reading some articles about it, I learned the following points.

First of all, no one can 100% read lips, no matter how talented they are. Some letters and sounds are not pronounced from the lips but from the throat or tongue or a combination of these: the S and T.

Other letters look the same on the lips. Try to say: mama and baba while looking at the mirror. You see? You don’t see any difference. They sound different but they look the same on lips.

Additionally, some Arabic letters are kind of invisible like: ح – ع – هـ so it’s quite impossible to distinguish them through looking at lips

Seeing lips helps us with some of the words we can't hear but not all. While we lipread, noise distracts our attention. To keep ourselves focused on that we need to hear or lipread, we put extra effort. Our brains work harder to filter out noise, decipher words, understand speech. Consequently, listening in such noisy environments consumes our energy and exhausts us which accelerates listening fatigue.

Indeed, we do a lot of guesswork to make up for the missing words that we can’t hear or lipread at the same time the speaker talks continuously. It’s draining! Not to forget that the environment where the conversation occurs is important; lighting, visibility of the speaker.

I remember when I needed to get vaccinated in Sri Lanka, the noise in the public hospital was intolerable. What made it worse was that the medical staff had masks on. I didn’t know at that time that I had to tell people about my hearing loss so we could find another way to communicate. My ex, who knew about it, was sitting far, texting on his phone, not only because he didn’t care but because I didn’t ask for help. I ended up guessing their questions. Up to today, I have no idea what kind of questions I was asked. I just hope I got the right vaccination in the end.

Another category that hinders lipreading, no matter the place is noisy or not, includes people who mumble. In my experience, I have a difficult time understanding some French speakers when they talk in English. Those I met with hardly moved their lips.

After the French comes some Germans. One day, a German guy was talking to my American friend and me in English. Then, he wondered whether I understood what he said, my friend immediately answered him no. In other situations, I’d get so angry that someone else spoke in my name but I didn’t because she, who had no problem with hearing, didn’t understand him either, as he mumbled.

Lipreading in one-on-one conversation is already a lot of work. Imagine when it’s a conversation with more than one person! And the situation sounds like a disaster when those people speak over each other. I have to follow faces and lips one by one which isn’t applicable in some situations.

In a nutshell, if talking to a hearing-impaired person around noise is inevitable, face them, enunciate and summarize what you say to make sure they get your point before you end the conversation or move to another point.

Thanks to your patience and collaboration, we can hear you better!