Signify wins Rep. Austin Scott’s 2024 Congressional App Challenge in Georgia’s Eighth District

When asked what inspired the creation of Signify, the students said, “We were inspired to create this app when one day at school we walked up to a girl who was standing in the middle of the hallway. Since she was blocking our path to get to class, we politely asked her to move; however, she didn’t budge. This was confusing for us because her lack of any reaction made it seem like she didn’t even hear us. We ask her a couple more times, slowly growing impatient, until a faculty member walks up to her and drags her to the side of the hall. The teacher tells us that she is so sorry for our inconvenience and turns to the girl while making a series of signs foreign to us at the time. It was at this moment that we realized that this girl was deaf, and that is why she could not hear us. Though we could not understand it, we knew she was using sign language as it was similar to what we’ve seen in movies. A strange feeling ran through us as we were shocked by the amount of struggle this girl must go through just to communicate with people. We had a feeling that we had to take some sort of initiative; however, we were not exactly sure of what we could do. 

With a goal to help those who are deaf, we decided to join the sign language club at our school. It was there that we both were flabbergasted at the sheer number of people who also struggle with this issue of communication because of their hearing loss. This just grew our desire to help people who suffer from hearing loss even more. We then realized what we could do to help these people when we attended a school assembly and saw a woman on stage using sign language to communicate with the crowd. While wishing I had some way to just translate what she was saying live, I realized that creating an app that would allow for this real-time translation would allow us to not only help people communicate with those who suffer from hearing loss but also spread awareness of this huge societal issue. This passion to help these other students fueled our drive to spend months developing Signify.”