Lipspeaking

Why am I writing a post about lipspeaking
I asked various real life and Internet friends if they knew what lipspeaking was and how it worked and more than 75% had no idea or were guessing. People said they would like a blogpost.

 I have to start out by saying I am not an expert on lipspeaking. I have known what lipspeakers are since 1995 but never used one myself or been around anyone using one. I am sharing information and knowledge that I have acquired from being on various online deaf communities. This post contains some of my contextualised opinions as well as information.

 I am using the word deaf to mean anyone with a hearing impairment and or has any kind of difficulty accessing spoken speech sounds e.g auditory processing disorder etc.

What is a lipspeaker
A lipspeaker is a person who has been specially trained to repeat a speaker's speech in a more easy to lipread way. Usually silently but they can use their voice on request.

Lipspeakers may add fingerspelling, sign language, body language and other cues to their communication and will adapt their communication according to what the deaf client requests and needs.

Where the original speaker is speaking very fast a lipspeaker may have to rephrase what is said and only repeat the more essential and salient points. A lipspeaker is supposed to be less than a sentence behind the original speaker.

 There are different levels of lipspeaking qualification. Level 3 seems to be the level required for professional lipspeaking.

North American terms
North Americans often use the term "speech reading" for what we UKers call lipreading.

I now wonder what lipspeakers are called in America...? Googling didn't initially help so I asked humans on the Internet and got an answer in under 5 minutes.  Lipspeakers in America are called "oral transliterators".

What does lipspeaking look like
As of April 2013 there is only one 2min35s subtitled video on the brand new ALS website. The video is of a spoken voice which the filmed lipspeaker is lipspeaking for. This video is a deliberately staged and slightly exaggerated example of lipspeaking which is well designed to demonstrate the principles and concepts of lipspeaking.

http://lipspeaking.co.uk/videos/

I am hoping (and have asked) if the ALS can upload some different short clip examples of lipspeaking in the wild and using different modifications like sign language and language modification.

Lipspeaking in situational contexts Mileage is going vary hugely for how useful people find lipspeaking dependent on many factors such as:

When they became deaf e.g at birth or before they developed language, early childhood, adulthood or in old age.

Rapidity of deafness whether sudden or gradual.

Level of deafness.

Type of deafness.

Amplification choices - none, hearing aids, CIs, others.

Communication choices - speech, residual hearing, sign (BSL/SSE/SEE), cueing and more.

Education - level, quality, type, awareness.

Individual personality and preference and situation.

For oral deaf (people who communicate primarily with speech and use residual hearing possibly with hearing aids and cochlea implants) and deafened (those who have been hearing and become deaf) people lipspeaking enables them to access the tone, cadence, meaning and body language of the original speaker while accessing the clarity provided by the lipspeaker. Many people could not access this with text based communication options.

A lipspeaker (like a sign language interpreter) can move around with a deaf person in situations like conferences and places where small groups of people are clustered around talking.

A lipspeaker terping for a group may well be much much easier to follow as it's a single person rather than having to look around to find the new speaker and switch focus to them and their new lipspeaking patterns. It takes deaf people longer to realise a new speaker has started talking and "lock in" to the new speaker's speech patterns.

To lipread English (or an other spoken language) effectively requires the deaf person to have a suitable vocabulary for understanding what has been said. Basically someone has to have the language and vocabulary in the first place to make use of this so it may not be suitable for a BSL user who does not have good English.

Lipreading classes
I am a huge fan of lipreading classes for people who are deaf, especially those who become deafened as I believe they teach a lot of very useful skills for coping with being deaf in the real world.

 Action on Hearing Loss's Lipreading page: http://www.actiononhearingloss.org.uk/get-involved/campaign/read-my-lips/lipreading-for-people-with-hearing-loss.aspx

I must sign up for some of those classes myself at some point.

Association of Lipspeakers The professional body which represents lipspeakers is the Association of Lipspeakers (ALS) and their newly designed website is at http://www.lipspeaking.co.uk/.

This website is pretty comprehensive and worth a read in their own words.

You can also search for lipspeakers on the National Registers of Communication Professionals (NRCPD) website at http://www.nrcpd.org.uk/ Tip, you have to provide a location before it'll let you select professional type in the next field.

Many lipspeakers also have their own websites.

Lipspeaking seems to cost approx £30-£40 an hour and may be charged in minimum increments of 2 hours, or by the half/whole day.  Two lipspeakers may be required for long or complex assignments.

My thoughts on lipspeaking for me
I think lipspeaking still requires the deaf person to concentrate a lot.

Lipreading and using residual hearing is tiring and only about 35% of the English language is even possible to lipread from normal lip patterns alone. I do not yet know if this is higher for lipspeakers (using modifications and otherwise).

Last time I was tested (artificial conditions, previous hearing aids) using single words and careful male audiologist spoken sentences:

Without lipreading my comprehension was ~60%

With lipreading my comprehension was 90% 

I found the lag on the ALS video somewhat disconcerting and am not sure that I would gain much from a lipspeaker that I don't get from lipreading most speakers for myself. In fact watching the video felt much like my few experiences of sharing someone's BSL terp where it was useful and gave me some extra info but extremely tiring to take advantage of as my BSL is fairly poor level 2 standard. 

I think I use a lot of my energy processing audio, even with lipreading or sign language supplementation. This means my memory for audio information is poor. At work I have to make notes or I'll not remember what my students have said properly. 

I have an excellent (as in frightening people by what details I recall) memory for information I have seen presented in text. 

While I haven't experienced a true test of lipspeaking I don't think it is for me. However I think more people should know about it and evaluate whether it's something they would find useful and share this information with deaf and hearing people. 

Questions? 

If you have any questions, chuck em in the comments. Please tell me if I use words which you don't know, so I can go back and expand/define them if needed. 

I'll probably edit this post as I go along.

See Hear does tech

I decided to watch this week's See Hear (7th Nov Ep21 Series 32) about technology which was filmed in the At Bristol science and discovery centre.

I found the episode really interesting and the humour was right up my street. The main presenters were Memnos and Ahmed with three guest reviewers Frank, Louise and Jacob.

Wasabi fire alerter

First up was a brief feature on a Japanese fire alerting system called the Wasabi.

Designed for deaf and hard of hearing people emits a Wasabi smell to alert people to the fact it's going off as flashing lights need line-of-sight and deaf/HOH people may not hear a siren. The unnamed See Hear researcher didn't find the wasabi smell very alerty, it just reminded him of enjoyable Japanese food however others found it more irritating and eye-streamy. It apparently is quite reliable at waking people up!

Siemens Waterproof, sweatproof and dustproof hearing aid

This was the largest feature of this episode about Jamie a Scottish marathon runner who became moderately deaf when he was 17. Jamie struggled to cope with traditional hearing aids not being wearable while he ran in the rain or other outdoors environments. He plans to run a 160 mile marathon called the Ocean Floor Race in the Sahara Desert which would also be dusty. Jamie did some research and found the Siemans Aquaris a digital 12 or 16 channel waterproof and dustproof hearing aid marketed at active sporty people.

What I liked most about this feature was the emphasis on the social and every day impact of regular hearing aids' vulnerability to rain, sweat and dust. I take my hearing aid out in the rain and I've never really known any different. I can't swim with my hearing aids in so I only swim with people who can sign because I am too deaf to follow speech without it. Like Jamie I worry about being approached for any conversation when I am not wearing my hearing aid.

My only real criticism of this feature was the lack of detail about the Siemens Aquaris. It was named once, but never shown clearly outside of Jamie's ear. I had to resort to the Siemens scary sales-bling website to find out more...

• A four minute captioned video intro to the Aquaris
• Kirsty's captioned 4 minute video testimonial
• A PDF "information" aka sales brochure with specs on the last page
and
• a PDF Aqaris user guide.

Sony subtitle glasses

Next up was a feature about a pair of spectacles which display subtitles for deaf or hard of hearing person while they are at a cinema without having to have subtitles on the screen for all viewers. Hearing people often complain about subtitles which is a good way of making me lose my temper at their intolerance and ignorance.

Louise thought the glasses were heavy and a bit small but the subtitles themselves were very clear. Jacob felt the glasses affected the emotion of the films and he and Frank didn't like the way they had to look for both film and subtitles.

Technabob.com have a brief review page of the subtitle glasses including a fairly informative three minute video explaining the issues and how the glasses would work in practice which wasn't really covered all that well in See Hear.

I was unsurprised to find that this system only works with Sony's 4K digital cinema system and is unlikely to ever be compatible with anything else. I have concerns about proprietary technologies and vendor lockin where that can limit people to only certain expensive products or suppliers and limit innovation by a wider pool of people. If there is only one supplier it changes the power balance of the supplier over the users.

Portable Sign Language Translator (PSLT)

This was the best technically presented feature of the episode with a very clear show and tell of how the system works. I didn't feel I had to hit Google to find out more about how it worked because I was shown. I also have a long standing interest in the research into language recognition from my undergraduate degree.

PSLT is basically software which works on a laptop or mobile device (needs a camera) to pick up a signer's face and hands to recognise sign language using hand movement, orientation, shape, and facial information to turn that into text.

PSLT is in very early days yet. Even speech to text is highly variable in success and sign language presents a number of different challenges for recognition. A See Hear viewer was allowed to take PSLT out of the lab and spend a day playing with it. His review was honest about how he had to sign very slowly, in a very small sign space and the pickup was still very limited. However he had high hopes for development.

The PSLT development team were also very careful to clarify that they do not expect this software to replace professional interpreting for critical situations and that their aim is mainly about casual every day conversations and as a sign language learning aid. They have made it software so that it will be usable on a wide variety of devices which is an ethos I really strongly approve of.

Frank identified potential issues with regional signing. Louise was concerned about the development time and need for this now. Memnos was very positive about the researcher's working even when things got hard.

Alarm clocks review

Memnos, Ahmed, Frank, Louise and Jacob reviewed three different alarm clocks aimed at deaf and hard of hearing people.

1. Amplicomms TCL200 at £43.83 ex VAT
   Frank didn't like the numbers or how the controls were on the top, side and back. Jacob felt it was aimed at hard of hearing people because of the speaking clock function which he felt was strange for a deaf people. Louise felt the music symbols on the back-controls implied it was more aimed at hard of hearing people who would listen to music. Memnos thought the vibration was quite subtle with the implication it might not be strong enough.
   
   I was a bit bemused by the fact that the reviewers (who all seem to be confident sign language using big D deafie types) were put off by the features which people with more hearing might use even though it also has a flashing light and vibrating pad. I checked the manual and it has a lot of features which is the sort of thing I like a lot but recognise others find that offputting and difficult. Maybe it is the fmGenie of alarm clocks. I wonder if the vibrating pad would wake me up at all!
   
   
2. Bellman and Symfon Pro Model at £71 ex VAT
   Louise felt the vibration was a bit intermittent and slow so she thought it might not wake her up. Jacob felt that the gentle increasing vibrations which would wake him up gradually were a selling point as a strong vibration is very sudden and puts him in a bad mood - I laughed in recognition at this point!


3. Geemarc Sonic boom SB200 at £26.66 ex VAT
   This was Frank's favourite because all the controls were simple and on the top. Louise liked the sleeker look of this and the strong vibration which would definitely wake her up.

Musical bath

The final quick feature showed Memnos sitting in a bath with comedy red shorts and little yellow ducks! The bath has a sound system built into it with strong bass vibrations which Memnos can't hear but can feel and his wife might hear. Ahmed rushed to jump in and boogie along to the beat.

A good friend of mine who until recently lived in Brighton has been involved in a musical swimming event where speakers are placed into a swimming pool while people are swimming. I'd probably get some hearing from this as a lot of my deafness is conductive. If I ever get round to going I'll write it up here!

Blogging Against Disablism Day (BADD): Fire safety tech for the deaf

I suck at this regular blogging lark.  


Today is blogging against disablism day #BADD.  I retweeted this article about accessing services when using the phone is different, difficult or impossible but was failing to think of anything to blog about myself for today.










Until our doorbell went and I ended up with three firefighters in my front room... 

Changing background colour: Screen tinting/overlay software review

 Changing background colour on things to ease reading is a cheap and simple way of making some things more accessible.  You can't always rely on colour changing options to be available or very well implemented. 

Hardware reading rulers are very effective and I definitely recommend trying them as a cheap solution for anyone struggling to read.  I recently purchased some Crossbow Reading Rulers and coloured overlays for a family member from The Dyslexia Shop for little over £10 for two overlays and two rulers.

Now attaching overlays to your monitor is ugly and requires your monitor to be a set size as well as being silly if there is software out there.  I have been looking at software which will provide a whole-screen tint of a colour of the user's choice.

This is a quick and dirty review of some apps I have tried to use for this purpose

Screen Tinter Light - FREE

This is a free app I found out about via a DSA assessment.  If it worked it would be nice, but it does this weird half-attempt at background colours, so half of the application's window frames (there's a word for that isn't there!) but not the contents of the window.  It doesn't evenly tint all the screen, just somebits of it so it looks like the graphics card has dropped back to 16 colour mode, or you've got a splitting headache.  I wasn't impressed. 

Crossbow Virtual Reading Ruler - £20ish

This is a piece of software written in Java for Mac or PC.  It allows a mobile overlay to be put over any part of the screen.  The settings once you can get them up as the java-ness makes it a bit unresponsive are lovely, very clear and easy to use.  They have some nice default settings and lots of tweakability for advanced users. 

Shame that you can't make the overlay bits lock, what they seem to mean by lock is that the overlay follows mouse.  What I wanted was something I could say "lock over screen" while still allowing me to click on things underneath the overlay as it were.  With this one, if you click on something which is covered by the overlay bit the overlay gets selected.  that becomes obstructive when you are trying to get on with using your computer as normal. 

You can't get a free trial of this.  A downloadable version for 1-3 machines is £17.99

Claro Screenruler Bundle - £100ish outside of DSA

This is a part of Claro's software collection which is often bundled in with Claro Read.  The copy I used for review was the standalone Screen Ruler bundle which is a CD and USB stick both containing the software.  I have currently only had time to play with the usb stick.  On plugging it in, Windows picks it up, does the usual recognising hardware thing and gives you an option to choose which bit you would like to use.  I'm wanting a whole screen overlay so I chose that.  Sometimes it pops up the "what app do you want" dialogue twice which the user has to close instance #2 of. 

On first opening the settings menu pops up giving the user a choice of colours and opacity of those colours. These aren't as flexible as the Virtual Reading ruler but they're fairly self explanatory.  Once you are happy with the colour you click OK and the application minimises to the system tray (bottom right hand of start bar).  You can carry on using windows as usual.  You then have your usual computer but with tinted overlay on top of it.  It doesn't interact with anything unless you open up the settings by selecting it from the system tray.

Glitches noticed in testing were that sometimes it doesn't tint my start bar and sometimes it does. I'm running twin monitors and it will only tint one screen at a time with tint changing monitor with mouse location  On a colleague's machine it didn't tint the content part of the windows in Microsoft Applications.  More testing needed I think. 

You can download 15 day free trials for mac and PC from Claro's website

Zoomtext - £400ish for nonreader version

Zoomtext is going to be overkill for most users but is worth a quick mention as I have come across people, usually who have visual impairments who need very specific colours changing, or need to do complex things with contrast, brightness or tone down one particular colour or enhance one other particular colour.

Where none of the other packages did what was needed Zoomtext was believed to be suitable as well as  providing a bit of zoom function.  You can download a 60 day free trial from AI Squared the software company and have a play.