An open standard
The Three Senses Alerting Standard
See it. Feel it. Hear it. One shared rhythm for all.
Open rules that make every emergency warning detectable by sight, touch, or hearing alone, with the full warning, including the action, guaranteed in accessible language. Drafted by International Deaf Emergency, free to copy, offered to regulators, and running today in a working app.
One warning. Two very different experiences.
Hearing people
A siren says: DANGER. One sound, one meaning, learned once.
Deaf people
A text message that feels like any other message. It can sit in a list. It can be seen too late. In an emergency, later can be too late.
Deaflare gives Deaf people what the siren gives everyone else: a warning language of its own.
One warning. Three ways to understand it.
See it
The screen becomes a beacon.
A full-screen color wash, a large picture of the danger, and a white torch frame at the screen’s edges, readable from across a room, at full brightness even if your screen was dim.
Feel it
Each danger has its own vibration.
Water rolls. Storm knocks. Ground holds. Fire races. Face down in a pillow at 3 a.m., the pattern alone wakes you and tells you what is coming. For DeafBlind people, this is how the alert arrives. The full message follows in accessible text.
Hear it
A siren tone for the people around you.
The same rhythm as the vibration, played at full volume even if the phone was turned down, so a hearing partner in the next room hears what you feel.
Every alert is sent on all three senses, and the hazard rhythm reads the same on any ONE of them: the rhythm names the danger family, and the exact event and action always follow in accessible language. No essential part of a warning depends on any single sensory feature. It also helps everyone else: asleep, headphones on, in a loud factory. Everyone is situationally deaf for hours every day.
Every alert answers five questions.
This is the heart of the Three Senses Alerting Standard, the draft rulebook we wrote while building Deaflare, because no rules existed to follow.
Is this an emergency?
A special signal that is hard to confuse. The whole screen becomes the alert. Nothing ordinary looks like it.
How serious is it?
Color, a shape mark, and vibration strength all show the same level. Color never works alone.
What danger is it?
A picture and a vibration pattern. At night, the pattern alone can tell you what is coming.
What should I do now?
The action comes first, in simple words. “GO TO HIGH GROUND NOW”, before any weather details.
More information, in my language?
Local sign language by a real Deaf signer, never an avatar, plus text, speech, and braille-ready text.
How serious is it? Color never works alone.
Four levels, spoken three ways at once: color for the eye, marks for people who are color-blind, vibration strength for touch.
SAFE NOW
all clear
an affirmative all-clear message, presented calmly: no alarm rhythm
BE CAREFUL
get ready
gentle vibration, one quarter strength
DANGER COMING
prepare to act
half strength, and light and sound at full power from here up
ACT NOW
life danger
three quarters to full strength, same rhythm, never faster
The marks count the danger: one at BE CAREFUL, two at DANGER COMING, three at ACT NOW. The hand reads severity in four distinct strengths, so a DeafBlind person feels which step it is; from DANGER COMING upward, light and sound deliver at full power, because they exist to reach you. The all-clear plays no alarm at all: the screen says in calm words what has ended, because silence alone is never proof of safety. When the danger changes, the phone alerts again.
What danger is it? A pattern your body can learn.
Not fifty patterns, a small vocabulary of danger families. These are drawn to scale below, and shown still, never flashing: this page is safe for photosensitive visitors, exactly like the app.
WATER
flood · tsunami · storm surge
long, rolling pulses that keep coming
STORM
cyclone · typhoon · tornado
three sharp pulses
GROUND
earthquake · landslide
one long pulse that does not let go
FIRE
fire · wildfire
ten fast pulses, nothing else is this fast
These patterns are a draft. Testing with Deaf and DeafBlind people is how they will be finished, and that is the point of the app.
Why these rhythms? They come from the hazards, and from sign languages.
The patterns are not invented codes. Each one is the hazard’s own movement, turned into touch and light, converging with how sign languages already depict these dangers. You do not memorize them. You recognize them.
WATER rolls.
A wave swells, travels, and hits. The rhythm does the same: long, then long again, like the rolling hand motion of the signs for waves and flood.
GROUND holds.
An earthquake does not pause, and neither does its rhythm: one long unbroken shake, like the sustained shaking of the earthquake sign. Nothing else is unbroken.
STORM knocks.
Wind arrives in gusts that slam. Three sharp knocks, like something striking the house, spaced like the storm itself.
FIRE flickers.
Flames flicker fast. Many quick pulses, like the sign for fire in many sign languages: the fingers of both hands flickering upward. Nothing else is this fast.
Because waves, quakes, and flames behave the same in every country, these rhythms need no translation and no reading. They work for speakers of minority languages, foreign travelers, and children exactly as they work for Deaf and DeafBlind people.
The app is the laboratory. The rules are the goal.
While building Deaflare we searched for the rules an accessible alert must follow, and found none. So we wrote a draft: the Three Senses Alerting Standard, running in the app today as a reference implementation, free to copy. Inside the app, a Test & Learn tab lets you feel every pattern, practice every severity level, and try realistic drill alerts, safely marked TEST ONLY, never mistakable for the real thing.
We presented this work at the World Federation of the Deaf 75th Anniversary Webinar on disaster risk reduction. One founder is not enough: the standard will be finished by the Deaf and DeafBlind people who test it.
Where the standard stands today.
Filed
Filed as formal comments in the United States FCC proceeding on modernizing the nation’s alerting systems (filed 31 August 2026, ECFS accession 2026083191368668), proposed as input to the UN Early Warnings for All initiative, and being adapted for the European Union’s public-warning framework.
Running
Implemented end to end in Deaflare, our reference app, and running on real devices today. Structured testing with Deaf and DeafBlind users is underway; blind and partially sighted participants will also be invited as experts in auditory access.
Free to copy
The standard is open: the specification, the machine-readable rhythm vocabulary, a developer SDK (TypeScript, @ideafe/three-senses on npm), and a conformance test suite are published on GitHub, and every release is archived on Zenodo with a citable DOI (10.5281/zenodo.21977982). Alerting authorities, device makers, and researchers are welcome to adopt it, test it, and improve it with us.
Questions people ask
How do alerts reach a phone if the internet is shut down?
Government alerts do not travel by internet or SMS. They use cell broadcast: a radio signal from the cell tower that reaches every phone at once, with no data plan and no congestion. No app may read that channel, on Android or iOS. The operating system presents the alert itself. An app can teach the rhythm language and play it perfectly, but only the OS hears the radio. That is why this standard is addressed to regulators and phone makers: the alert pipe already exists, and even carries a hazard-type field. What is missing is the rule that its presentation must carry meaning.
Could SMS with a small code drive the rhythms, without AI?
Yes. The standard publishes an SMS profile: a five-character code (3S:W4 means water family, extreme) that any sender can append and one line of code can read. It exists for the places that alert by SMS today, like countries without cell broadcast and humanitarian operations in camps and shelters. Automatic SMS reading is Android-only and restricted in app stores, so the profile targets managed deployments, not consumer apps.
Can an implementer change the rhythms?
No. A warning language only works if FIRE feels the same everywhere, like the siren. Anyone may implement the standard for free, but altering a pattern makes it something else, and it must not be called Three Senses. Changes are proposed openly on GitHub and versioned as governance events.
Is it really free?
Yes. The vocabulary and code are Apache-2.0, the specification text is CC BY-ND 4.0, there is no membership and no royalty, and every release is archived with a citable DOI.