  At least 360 million people worldwide have disabling hearing loss that
frequently causes difficulties in day-to-day conversations. Hearing aids often
fail to offer enough benefits and have low adoption rates. However, people with
hearing loss find that speechreading can improve their understanding during
conversation. Speechreading (often called lipreading) refers to using visual
information about the movements of a speaker's lips, teeth, and tongue to help
understand what they are saying. Speechreading is commonly used by people with
all severities of hearing loss to understand speech, and people with typical
hearing also speechread (albeit subconsciously) to help them understand others.
However, speechreading is a skill that takes considerable practice to acquire.
Publicly-funded speechreading classes are sometimes provided, and have been
shown to improve speechreading acquisition. However, classes are only provided
in a handful of countries around the world and students can only practice
effectively when attending class. Existing tools have been designed to help
improve speechreading acquisition, but are often not effective because they
have not been designed within the context of contemporary speechreading lessons
or practice. To address this, in this thesis I present a novel speechreading
acquisition framework that can be used to design Speechreading Acquisition
Tools (SATs) - a new type of technology to improve speechreading acquisition.
