"Just about everyone, regardless of hearing ability, picks up information from seeing others’ faces, and most people lip-read to some degree."

"But deaf and hard of hearing people do it more, especially in noisy places. I don’t sign, but people who do also use facial expressions to help to connote meaning in American Sign Language. When I’m somewhere noisy, and a person speaking to me is wearing a mask, my speech comprehension is abysmal. I can understand about 20 percent of what is being said, which is functionally useless. Early in the pandemic, at the end of a stressful two-hour grocery trip, the cashier was trying to explain that she couldn’t use my reusable bags. She seemed frustrated when I couldn’t answer simple questions. She was clearly stressed and needed to call in a second cashier before I understood what the problem was.... The pandemic has made it even clearer that the world is not made for people with disabilities."

From "I’m Deaf and I Lip-Read. All Those Masks Are Presenting a Problem" by Nehama Rogozen (in Slate).

Before reading this article, I hadn't thought about the problem masks present for people who rely on lip reading to interact with other people. People with disabilities stir special sympathy. But notice that she is also talking about how we are all disabled in our ability to understand each other people when half the face is covered. No smiles. No frowns. No lip-pursing. No slack-jawed awe. No yawning. Without the ability to see a facial expression, we may lose interest in other people. Why do we want to have conversations? Rogozen speaks of her difficulty getting through a supermarket check-out line, and we have a lot of motivation to do that, to get the things we need as we live our at-home life. But we may slip away from deeper conversations if they do not connect us to a human face.



From the Wikipedia article "Facial expression." Caption: "Photographs from the 1862 book Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine by Guillaume Duchenne. Through electric stimulation, he determined which muscles were responsible for different facial expressions. Charles Darwin would later republish some of these photographs in his own work on the subject, which compared facial expressions in humans to those in animals."