Holographic Cards
A sign is a movement through space. Print it flat and you delete the part that carries the meaning. HoloCards are lenticular cards that show the sign moving in the child's hand — no screen, no battery, no app.
We are not a government agency and we are not on anyone's approved list, because no such list exists. What we are is the vendor of record behind a funding process that already runs: a clinician hands a family a printed referral, the family brings it to their early-intervention or IEP meeting, and the agency issues a purchase order. Our job is to give all three people the exact paperwork that process asks for.
🩺 The clinician
Hands a family a printed handout at diagnosis. No budget required from the clinic, no inventory, no liability — a referral, not a sale.
Trusted referral pointClinician resources →
👶 The family
Brings a printed voucher to the IFSP or IEP meeting, citing the regulation that puts assistive technology on the table. Prepared, not pleading.
Empowered advocateParent toolkit →
🏛️ The payer
State early intervention, a school district, or a Medicaid waiver. Already obligated to fund assistive technology written into a plan.
Direct billing funderProcurement →
How the money actually moves
A need is identified
An audiologist, SLP, early-intervention provider or developmental pediatrician sees a child who needs visual language access, and documents it.
It goes into the plan
The team writes assistive technology into the IFSP (birth–3) or IEP (3–21). Under 34 CFR §300.5, an AT device is "any item… whether acquired commercially off the shelf" — there is no approved-products list to be on.
The agency purchases it
The program issues a purchase order against a W-9. We ship directly to the family or the clinic.
What "no cost to the family" does and doesn't mean
When AT is written into an IFSP or IEP, the program is responsible for providing it — but two federal rules shape what a family actually pays.
Part C is the payer of last resort (34 CFR §303.510). Private insurance and Medicaid are billed first; Part C funds cover what they don't. And 34 CFR §303.500 permits states to run a system of payments, which can include sliding-scale fees or co-pays.
So the honest statement is this: families have paid $0 where the team approved the device and no other payer applied. It is an outcome of a team decision, not a property of the product — and anyone who promises you otherwise is describing a state they haven't checked.
Why motion, specifically
This isn't a preference for nicer pictures. Sign languages encode meaning in five phonological parameters — handshape, location, movement, palm orientation, and non-manual markers. A static drawing can show you two of them. It is structurally incapable of showing the other two.
That prediction is borne out in the instructional-psychology literature. A meta-analysis of 26 studies (76 pairwise comparisons) found a medium overall advantage for dynamic over static presentation — and a large advantage, d = 1.06, specifically when the material is procedural-motor knowledge. A sign is procedural-motor knowledge. That is our row of the table, and it was independently replicated in 2016.
Distinguishing look-alike signs
Pairs that differ mainly in movement or palm orientation — the two parameters a flat card cannot carry.
Illustrative model, not measured outcomes. These figures show the effect our design is built around — that recognition of a minimal pair depends on the parameters a flat image drops. They are our own projection and have not been collected from a study. The peer-reviewed finding behind the direction and size of the effect is the d = 1.06 procedural-motor result cited above.
Expected vocabulary growth
Signs a child produces, by age in months.
Modeled projection, not measured outcomes. This curve is our own model of expected growth under the two conditions. It is drawn to show the shape of a compounding advantage — earlier access to unambiguous signs makes the next sign easier — and should be read as an illustration of the argument, not as collected data.
What the peer-reviewed evidence does and doesn't say
Well established. Early access to a visual language matters enormously for deaf and hard-of-hearing children. Delayed language access carries documented, lasting cost, and a 2024 study in Developmental Science found deaf children exposed to sign language before cochlear implantation outperformed both deaf peers without sign exposure and hearing peers on measures of spoken language. Sign access is not a competitor to speech — it protects it.
Well established. Dynamic beats static for motor-procedural learning (d = 1.06, meta-analytic, replicated).
Not established, and we won't claim it. That teaching signs to a hearing baby produces a lasting spoken-vocabulary advantage. Controlled studies have not found one. What they did find is that signing caregivers were measurably more responsive to their baby's nonverbal cues — which is a real benefit, and a different one. No study has found sign exposure harmful to a hearing child.
Find a clinician near you
Pick a provider type or type your own, add your city and state, and search. This opens a live map — the same one you'd get from Google, aimed at the people who can start the paperwork.
Choose from the list or write anything — then finish the line with your city and state.
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Take the next step
Every route below is free, printable, and yours to walk in with.
I'm a parent → I'm a clinician → I purchase for an agency →HoloCards are educational aids for language exposure and practice. They are not a medical device, not certified interpretation, and not a substitute for qualified instruction or a licensed interpreter. See our disclaimers.