Cued Speech is a modality for spoken languages that was developed by Dr. R. Orin Cornett at Gallaudet University in 1966. Cornett recognized that distinguishing features of spoken sounds were not available to deaf children and that lipreading was not reliable. He then devised manual signals that, when delivered with the information on the mouth, reintroduce distinguishing features so that all the building blocks of English are unambiguous in a visual channel. This means that deaf children hava access to the phoneme stream of English through their vision.
Handshapes represent consonant phonemes. Placements and movements represent vowel phonemes. Cued Speech has been adapted to more than 50 languages and dialects.