Activity Record
What International Deaf Emergency has actually done, with a date on every entry and a document or public record behind it.
We are a small organization asking people to fund work they cannot see happening. The least we owe them is a page they can check without taking our word for anything.
How to read this page
Every entry names a dated act and points at something you can open without asking us: a document we host, a government docket, a public registry, an archived release. Where the underlying document is restricted and cannot be published, the entry says so and says why, rather than being left off.
This page records only work that is finished. Nothing here is a plan, an intention, or something in progress. If it is on this page, it has already happened and you can go and check it.
2026
- Regulatory
Filed reply comments with the United States FCC on direct video calling to 911
An eight page reply in the Commission's Next Generation 911 proceeding, PS Docket Nos. 21-479 and 13-75, filed five days ahead of the deadline. It shows that no commenter opposes direct video calling to 911 on the merits and that the record converges on a Commission-sponsored, voluntary pilot; answers the argument that better relay-interpreter training could substitute for calling 911 in one's own language; and names four gaps no other filing addressed: DeafBlind access, the tactile channel, what happens to a video call on a failing network, and how accessibility applications should read 911 readiness data. It also asks for two protections IDE would be bound by itself: native 911 access must never require enrollment in any application, including IDE's own, and a caller must be able to withhold video whenever video would endanger them. The document is tagged for screen readers.
- United Nations
Submission to the UN thematic study marking twenty years of the Convention
Input to the annual thematic study of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, under Human Rights Council resolution 61/9, on twenty years of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It argues that accessible emergency information is the Convention's unfinished business: that warning systems still assume a working sense the recipient may not have, that no system we know signals the end of an emergency accessibly, and that DeafBlind people are excluded by construction wherever a design offers only sight or only sound. Stakeholder contributions are published by OHCHR before the Human Rights Council's sixty-fourth session.
- Regulatory
Filed formal comments with the United States FCC on alerting modernization
A twenty-one page comment in the Commission's proceeding on modernizing the nation's alerting systems, PS Docket Nos. 15-91, 15-94 and 25-224. It argues that accessibility obligations attach to the attention layer of a public warning and to the signal that an emergency has ended, not only to the words of the alert, and that DeafBlind people must be named expressly in alerting rules because a system designed for visual or audio access excludes them by construction. The document is tagged for screen readers.
- Agreements
Memorandum of agreement with the FEMA IPAWS program completed
All parties signed an agreement with the United States FEMA Integrated Public Alert and Warning System program, covering development and interoperability testing of accessible alerting tooling. This lets IDE work directly against the national alert feeds that its application redistributes.
Why there is no document here: The agreement itself is a For Official Use Only document. We publish the fact that it was signed and its date; we do not publish, quote or attach the document. IDE is not a FEMA partner, vendor or alert originator, and does not claim any endorsement.
- United Nations
Submission to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
A contribution on article 11 of the Convention, which covers persons with disabilities in situations of risk and humanitarian emergencies, sent to the Committee's secretariat, which acknowledged receipt the same day. It proposes treaty language requiring that a public warning reach people through a channel they can actually perceive, and that the end of an emergency be signalled as deliberately as its beginning.
- United Nations
Introduced the Three Senses work to the IASC Disability Reference Group
IDE is a member of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee Disability Reference Group, the humanitarian system's standing mechanism on disability inclusion. We circulated a plain-language introduction to the alerting standard to its co-chairs, offering it to the group's stocktake of the IASC Guidelines on Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities in Humanitarian Action.
- Speaking
Presented at the World Federation of the Deaf webinar on disaster risk reduction
Emmanuel Jacq spoke as a panelist at the WFD webinar on disaster risk reduction for Deaf communities, on “Designing Deaf-first disaster warnings: moving public alerting from audio-first to visual, haptic, and sign language.” IDE is an international member of the World Federation of the Deaf.
- Standards
Published the Three Senses Alerting Standard, free for anyone to implement
A specification for carrying the meaning of an emergency alert across sight, touch and sound, so that a person is not dependent on a channel they cannot perceive. The specification text, a machine-readable vocabulary, a software library and a conformance test suite are all public. It is publicly available and royalty-free: there is no membership, no fee, and no permission to ask. Every release is archived with a citable DOI.
Before 2026
IDE has worked with Deaf communities in disasters since 2010. That older work predates this record and is documented in our field reports rather than in public dockets.
- Founded in 2010 after the Haiti earthquake by Emmanuel Jacq, a Deaf French diplomat.
- 160+ homes built for Deaf families displaced by the Haiti earthquake.
- 400+ people trained in disaster risk reduction across three continents.
- Work in Haiti, Nepal and across Africa, with partnerships in 18+ countries.
- 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, EIN 27-3191911.
Found something wrong?
If an entry on this page is inaccurate, or a link is broken, tell us and we will correct it. A transparency page that nobody can challenge is not doing its job.