Signs and Chat don't work

My friend and I are in a realm. We both joined and realized we couldn't see each other's messages in chat UNLESS we use /say. We ALSO realized we couldn't see text on a lot of the signs. We've been troubleshooting by ourselves, restarted both our games, fiddled with settings, tried using ink and such to color and make it appear, googling things but never really got an answer that solved anything.