Introduction page | About David Smith | Program details | Modes | Puzzles | Advanced features

I grew up in the south east of England and lived in Kent with my wife and children until the mid 1980s. I studied Three Dimensional Design at Art College, and ran my own small business as a designer and maker of handmade furniture. In 1985 we moved to Stoke Ferry, in West Norfolk. It was at evening classes in 1988 that I first became interested in computer programming, and I have carried on with it as a hobby since then. I had my first experience with Meniere's Disease when I was 21. For many years it affected only my right ear. During these years the disease didn't seriously affect my lifestyle and was little more than an inconvenience most of the time. At the end of the 1990s it began to affect my left ear as well. The disease became fully bi-lateral, and began to have serious consequences for my livelihood. I now find hearing extremely difficult, even with the use of digital hearing aids. In 2005 it had become bad enough that I was forced to give up work. In 2004 I started attending Lipreading classes in the local town. Unfortunately, within a year or two the class had closed. West Norfolk is a rural area, and there weren't enough students to allow the courses to continue. This situation, together with my interest in computer programming, made me think that there must be some way that people can learn and practise lipreading without necessarily attending classes. It was out of this that the Lipreader program was conceived and developed, with the help of my lipreading tutor and others. I have rewritten it since then, and Lipreader 4 is the latest version.