–The Problem with Lip-Reading
Why _______ ____ client _____ lip _____ what ____ saying ___ ______?
Can you work out the question?
Lip-reading is not a perfect science. While the National Deaf Children’s Society found in 2024 that most deaf people are able to lip read to some extent, only 30-40% of English can be understood through mouth/lip patterns.
Even for experienced lip-readers, conversations – particularly of a legal or complex nature – can be difficult to follow. Unfamiliar words, multiple speakers, and a lack of deaf awareness can turn a run-of-the-mill meeting into a game of Mad Libs. Add to that a strong regional accent or a client who speaks English as a second language and you’re almost guaranteed to end up with missing and misunderstood information.
Things like names, figures, and technical jargon can be particularly difficult to lip-read as they are not commonly used in everyday conversation and so require more effort to work out. If your client asks you to repeat your name, do. In my first year in student halls, I thought my flatmate was called ‘Race’ for a full month before he informed me that it was, in fact, ‘Reece’. Clarification when we first met in our shared Oxford kitchen could’ve saved us both the embarrassment. An easy alternative would be to show the client your ID badge.
As Professional Services Providers, we want our clients to feel seen, understood, and for them to trust us. When you have a client who relies on lip-reading, you have to take additional steps to ensure that the message has been clearly received. There may not be a BSL interpreter in the room, but you still have a deaf client who will have different needs and preferences to clients who can hear. For example, it can be easy in an oral conversation to forget that your client is deaf and start to briefly look away or turn to get something from a bag or drawer. As soon as eye contact is broken, it’s like you have stopped speaking entirely. By the time your client has worked out what they missed in the two seconds you’d looked away, they’ve missed the sentence you said afterwards – turning the meeting into a constant game of catch-up. This puzzle of using context clues, body language, and facial expressions to work out what is being said can be exhausting and leave clients unsure as to whether or not what they thought you said was correct.
This erodes the confidence that is so vital for our clients to have in us and can alienate clients from their own legal/ financial proceedings.
Additionally, many practitioners mistakenly believe that hearing technologies, such as hearing aids and cochlear implants, make spoken communication with deaf clients just like communication with a hearing client. However, cochlear implants do not restore normal hearing, and many adults with an implant will still require the optimal conditions for lip-reading in order to follow the conversation. For the 20,000 deaf adults in the UK with one or two implants, following speakers who they cannot lip-read remains almost impossible (RNID, 2024).
Other communication pitfalls relate to the way in which we speak when communicating with a deaf client. You may have been told to ‘speak slowly and clearly’. Clear? Great. Slow? Not so much. Slowing down your speech and over-enunciating words warps your lip patterns, making it considerably harder for clients to work out which sounds you are making. The slow-motion approach can actually be offensive to clients who think you are patronising and belittling them. If you wouldn’t do it to a hearing client, don’t do it to a deaf one. It’s embarrassing for everyone involved.
Rather than progressing your meeting at half speed, speak normally with your face to the client, and use the last 10-15 minutes to go over the key points and see if your client wants anything clarified or repeated. This can also be a great time to give your client a brief summary of the main takeaways, including hard to lip-read content such as names, dates, and numbers/ costs, written in simple English. This way both you and your client can leave the meeting feeling confident and clear on the topic at hand.
As always, each client is different and will have different communication preferences. However, we hope that this little blog post will help you to feel more confident about working with clients who lip-read.
For more communication top tips when working with deaf clients and different communication styles, see our blog post ‘Working with a Deaf Client: Communication Top Tips’ here.
About the ADN: The Advisers for Deaf Network (ADN) is a not-for-profit initiative which exists to increase accessibility for d/Deaf clients accessing Legal and Financial Services. The ADN blog serves as a resource for increasing awareness of the barriers faced by the d/Deaf community in accessing services and for promoting best practice in accessibility.
