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Speaking while facing away from the class (board, screen, or notes).
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Assuming lipreading provides full comprehension of a fast or unclear speaker.
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Relying on a single verbal announcement for important information.
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Waiting for a problem to emerge rather than checking in proactively.
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Assuming every deaf or hard-of-hearing student wants the same type of support.
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Treating captioning or interpretation as optional extras rather than core delivery.
In Practice — A lecturer who paced while speaking
A hard-of-hearing student (a composite, illustrative example) who relied significantly on lipreading found a particular lecturer very difficult to follow, because the lecturer habitually paced back and forth and frequently spoke while turned toward the whiteboard.
What helped: once flagged, the lecturer agreed to stay facing the class and to write key terms on the board before, not during, explaining them — small changes that cost the lecturer almost nothing in delivery style but restored the student's ability to follow the session.
The lesson: the barrier had nothing to do with the content of the lectures, which the student found genuinely interesting, and everything to do with an unexamined delivery habit — a reminder that many of the most disruptive barriers in this category are behavioural, not technological, and are often simple to fix once named.