Rhoda Chester, an 89-year-old hearing-impaired grandmother of nine, wants to understand her grandchildren again.
"My grandchildren talk so low that I can't hear them," Chester said before a lipreading class Monday.
"You're lucky," joked Carolyn Caracausa, 68. "Mine are loud."
They and about 10 others became students again at a class at the United Way of North Central Florida, the first in a four-week series of lipreading classes.
UF's Speech and Hearing Clinic and the Gainesville chapter of the Hearing Loss Association of Florida sponsor the free classes on Mondays from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Pat Kricos, a UF professor of audiology, has led the classes for 38 years.
Older patients often get hearing aids without learning strategies to communicate or how to speak up when they need help, she said.
The class helps people learn that they are not alone in coping with hearing loss, Kricos said.
Gaining the ability to lip-read is a combination of hearing any sounds possible, watching the speaker's lips and using context clues, Kricos told the class.
For an hour, the students practiced with Kricos, her student assistants and each other. They learned how to recognize what certain letters and words look like on a person's lips.
For example, when someone says "fan," his or her teeth come over the bottom lip. But for "van," the movement is less pronounced.
Not at all discouraged, the students worked hard. They filled out multiple-choice worksheets, watching Kricos intently with glasses low on their noses and hearing aids tucked behind their ears.
"If we really get good at this, we can read what all the football coaches are saying," joked Lynn Rousseau, president of the Gainesville's HLAA chapter.
Kricos said the class will be fun and informative for her students.
"They need every little bit of help they can get," she said. "If nothing else, just giving them confidence that, yeah, they can learn how to lip-read."
Ann and Doug Bonneville, 76 and 80, respectively, laugh during a Living with Hearing Loss class Monday at the United Way of North Central Florida.
