“I have a friend who has a company, CapsX, who got in contact about working with me because I was a previous college athlete and a soccer player at BYU Hawaii. They were looking to add an ASL hat as a special support for the community. A lot of them were already doing the English, but the ASL portion of it—like with the hand shapes—is what they got in contact with me for.

Some stores throughout the U.S. associated with different universities have their ASL hats that they put in to support the deaf and the hard of hearing students to help improve their reading or writing education with technology as well.

Another company that I run is Signspaces. It’s a deaf education technology business that we’re using to assist students K-12. There are some schools that are now using it as educational assistance throughout the U.S. I’m also a full-time ASL teacher at Cottonwood High School.

Part of the reason that my business got set up here and started going is to focus on individuals with language deprivation, because 90% of parents with deaf children don’t actually know how to sign. So, these deaf children who don’t have parents to communicate with them will sit at the dinner table where their parents are just chatting, and they’re having all their socializing, but the deaf child is completely left out of these interactions. And so, as a result, these deaf children are always like, ‘Wait, what’s happening? What’d they say?’ And the parents are just very dismissive. ‘Oh, I’ll tell you later. I’ll tell you later.’ So, as you can imagine, this deprives these individuals of having the chance to develop their language, develop socially, which carries into their school. We really just want to provide the parents with the opportunity to learn these languages as well and help them kind of pick things up too.

My hope is that we’ll be able to provide deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals assistance as far as reading and writing goes. Because they are bilingual and taking ASL and English, they are very different. Sign language is a visual language. It’s not read. Whereas something like English is indeed a written language, sign language has its own rules of grammar, its own structure and being accessible for the entire community. They’re limited in their English ability, so I really want to be able to help with their futures and helping them land employment, develop their communication skills, reading and writing.

I would really like them to be able to see the caps. It’s something that’s kind of cool and neat. We have these hand shapes like ‘Utah’ in ASL and we’re showing that visual. They’ll able to see that and kind of increase their desire to support the deaf community and include them as one of our own as opposed to just keeping them on the sidelines.”

— Chris Wood, MBC, ’25