Something struck me the other day–for all that deaf and hard of hearing people are encouraged to lipread/speechread, there aren’t a lot of classes offered for it around here. You can always practice with DVDs with captions on, or–now that Amazon and Netflix have gotten it together somewhat–streaming video. (There seems to be a glitch between Firefox and Silverlight at the moment, though, so that might not be so helpful.)
However, there are some starting places online. YouTube, once you filter out NFL and Bad Lipreading, comes up with a few things. A series of about 30 lessons offers unvoiced sentences which appear neutrally US accented and are followed by captions after a pause. Sometimes the captions are mismatched, and once the woman clearly swears. 🙂 But it’s usually pretty obvious when the sentence doesn’t match, and it keeps you on your toes. There are also a few videos in a British accent, and what appears to be an explanation of lipreading Spanish for hearing people.
If you want to go a little more polished, lipreading.org offers practice videos for vowels, initial consonants, numbers, names, and guessing missing words. The multiple choice games are useful to a point, but particularly helpful might be the lipreading alphabet at the bottom of the page. There are not only pictures, but verbal descriptions of how the vowels and consonants are formed.
If you want practice with concentrating or hearing in noise, LACE has a demo that asks you to recognize one of two competing voices–male, female, or child.
Hand to Mouth: Assistive Technology 