Lipreading Is Not Inclusion
Amplify series
This signed video includes elements of British Sign Language and Sign Supported English (SSE), alongside English subtitles to support accessibility across Deaf and hearing audiences.
This video may require cookies to load. If it doesn’t appear, it may be due to your browser settings.
It’s often treated as enough, even when it isn’t.
Lipreading is often presented as a solution.
A compromise.
A reasonable expectation.
It is none of those things.
Lipreading is unreliable, exhausting, and dependent on ideal conditions – lighting, visibility, accent, speed, facial hair, camera quality, and emotional context. Even then, only fragments are accessible. Guesswork fills the gaps.
When systems rely on lipreading, responsibility quietly shifts onto Deaf people to work harder just to keep up. Missed information is reframed as a misunderstanding. Fatigue is mistaken for disengagement. Requests for proper access are treated as excessive.
This is not inclusion.
It is survival.
Inclusion does not ask people to decode incomplete information, while others communicate freely. It does not frame access tools as optional when discomfort arises. And it does not confuse coping strategies with equitable design.
Lipreading is not a replacement for access.
It is what people do when access is missing.
Why is lipreading still treated as an acceptable substitute for access?
The question and options at the end of the video were originally shared as part of an Instagram Story.
