A program of International Deaf Emergency
Deaf Atlas
Deaf people reach the world.
A program to record and preserve the world’s sign languages, including the endangered ones, and to train free sign-language-to-text technology on recordings donated with consent. Launching in 2026. The atlas is being built.
Not a voice missing. A voice already speaking.
The wrong way to describe this work is “giving Deaf people a voice.” Deaf communities have always had a voice. Sign language is that voice: a complete human language in its own right, not a workaround for an absent one.
What this technology actually does is teach the hearing world, and its machines, to hear a voice that was never missing. The distinction is not decoration. One framing asks you to fix something broken in Deaf people. The other asks you to fix something broken in the hearing world’s listening. Only one of them is true, and only one of them is a claim a Deaf-led organization can make without contradicting itself.
IDE already built one direction of this conversation, and it is in testing now: an alert reaching a Deaf person in an emergency. Deaf Atlas is the direction back. Not the dispatcher reaching the Deaf person, but the Deaf person answering, testifying, teaching, leading, and being understood without a third voice in the room.
The size of the gap.
~70 million
deaf people worldwide, the standing figure of the World Federation of the Deaf, whose own constituency is sign-language-using Deaf communities.
Interpreters that were never there
Many countries have few or no qualified, certified sign language interpreters, and where the need is greatest there are often none at all. A profession that trains one interpreter at a time cannot close that gap inside any funding cycle that exists.
This is not a service gap that more interpreter training closes at the margin. At the scale the WFD figure describes, technology is the only lever that operates at all.
Source for the 70 million figure: World Federation of the Deaf and World Association of Sign Language Interpreters, Statement on Use of Signing Avatars (opens in new tab), 14 March 2018, updated 14 April 2018.
Interpreters are the gold standard. This is for where there are none.
The 2018 joint statement of the World Federation of the Deaf and the World Association of Sign Language Interpreters is explicit that machine translation and signing avatars “do not surpass the natural quality and skill provided by appropriately trained and qualified interpreters and translators,” with particular concern for content that is live, complex, or of significant importance to Deaf people’s lives.
Deaf Atlas does not contest that ground. It is built to complement human interpreters and never to replace them, and it will be offered where no interpreter exists to begin with, never as a substitute for one who does. The same statement notes that avatar technology runs one direction only, spoken or written language rendered into sign, never the reverse. This program is built for the direction that statement says avatars cannot address at all: sign language carried outward into text.
What this looks like for one person.
A community leader
She testifies before a legislative committee that has no interpreter budget line, in her own language, and is understood.
A teacher
In a school district that has never once had a sign language interpreter on staff, she teaches a hearing colleague, a parent, an administrator, directly.
An entrepreneur
She pitches investors in the language she thinks in, not in a translated approximation of it.
None of the three needed an interpreter who was never going to be funded, staffed, or present. Each needed the return channel to exist at all.
What the program does.
Record and preserve
Sign languages number in the hundreds, and many have never been recorded at all. Village and rare sign languages can disappear inside one generation, with no dictionary, no archive, and no recording left behind. Deaf Atlas will record them with the communities that use them, and will keep the original video as the permanent asset, so that a better tool in twenty years can be run against the same recording.
Train technology that is free to use
Recordings donated with consent will train sign-language-to-text technology, so that a signer can be understood where no interpreter exists. It will be free for every Deaf person who wants it, and never conditioned on proving deafness to a gatekeeper.
The Atlas app
One tool for recording, captioning, and donating language, built to work offline and on one device, because that is the operating condition of the places where this documentation is most urgent. It is being built now.
Documentation sits upstream of everything else IDE does. An undocumented village sign language is a community no emergency alert ever reaches, because there is no shared, recorded vocabulary to alert it in.
Consent first. The community keeps its language.
People who donate recordings keep sovereignty over their own language data. Consent will be versioned and withdrawable: bound to the exact recording and the exact purpose it was given for, never a blanket click, never widened after the fact, and a withdrawal honoured as a standing commitment rather than a best-effort courtesy.
Community authorization will sit alongside individual consent, because a sign language belongs to a community and not only to the person in front of the camera. Benefit-sharing terms will be agreed in advance of any recording: what the community gets back, not only what is taken. Deaf communities hold the authority over their own linguistic data, and nothing in this program is built to weaken that.
These are the rules being written now, before the first recording, and not a description of a system already running.
Where the program stands today.
Stated plainly, because a program that documents languages honestly should describe itself the same way.
Launching 2026
Deaf Atlas is a program of International Deaf Emergency, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit behind this site. No new entity, no separate foundation. The program is starting now, and no fieldwork recording has taken place yet.
Being built
The Atlas app and the archive behind it are in development. The technology that turns sign language into text is a research program, not a finished product, and this page will say so until it works. Its own home, deafatlas.org (coming soon), is not live yet.
Where it is headed
The program is being shaped to sit alongside the United Nations International Decade of Indigenous Languages, 2022 to 2032: many of the rarest sign languages are used inside the indigenous and village communities that decade exists to serve. IDE is not a registered partner of it yet, and this page will say so until that changes. Language documentation funders and archives are welcome to talk to us now.
One family, three names.
IDE builds both directions of the same conversation, on one shared set of open rules.
Deaflare
The world reaches Deaf people.
Emergency alerts built to arrive in a form a Deaf person can actually perceive. In testing now.
See DeaflareDeaf Atlas
Deaf people reach the world.
Language recorded, preserved, and carried outward, so a signer can be understood where no interpreter exists. Launching 2026.
You are reading it.
Three Senses
The standard underneath.
The open rules both programs are built on, free for anyone to copy.
Read the standard