Motion Light Lab

Children who are deaf and hard of hearing have historically been deprived of language and access to many programs and services. 95% of Deaf children are born to hearing parents who struggle to communicate with their child. Parents are unfamiliar with Early Visual Communication strategies and do not use sign language, meaning parents do not engage with their children in play and communication and miss out on opportunities for the child to build complex language and ideas. This results in language deprivation for Deaf children, which has a devastating lifetime impact on them academically, socially, and healthwise. When hearing parents are given support, resources, and mentoring, they become motivated to use signing and visual communication. Motion Light Lab is building multiple collaborators and partnerships to combine their reach and resources to scale their impact. Research has shown that early visual communication and sign language access benefit all children. The core of this work is to build awareness and acceptance and expand language access for all children.

Our resources:
• VL2 Storybook Apps: award-winning bilingual ASL/English storybook apps designed to support literacy development.
• PLAYFVL: coming in 2025 - a play-led activity package for families with babies from birth to 18 months; designed to maximize visual communication access.
• Signing Characters: an assortment of media content featuring fluent 3D signing characters created through our state-of-the-art motion capture system.
• ASL Literacy Activities: a free learning platform for families and educators with over 20 weeks' worth of educational activities for young children.
• Training program: we collaborate and train teams all over the globe on creating storybook apps that support literacy development.