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.
The siren everyone else gets is itself only one word deep.
The fire alarm carries exactly one message: get out. In a tsunami, going outside is lethal and the roof is safety; in a tornado, the basement is. Three dangers, three opposite escapes, one bell.
The building often knows which hazard is coming; the alarm has no vocabulary to say it. That missing vocabulary is what the Three Senses Alerting Standard writes down, and what Deaflare implements. Once it exists, a child feels WATER on a wristband and knows: climb, not run.
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.
The Standard, page by page
- Three senses: rhythms, touch, light and sound
How one alert reaches sight, touch and hearing alone: the eight rhythm families, the four severity levels, and why rhythm works for DeafBlind people too.
- Receiving devices and apps: what every screen must do
What every receiving device must do with an emergency alert: the reference screen element by element, television rules, the severity strip and a checklist.
- CAP origination annex: accessibility at the source
The informative CAP origination annex of the Three Senses Standard: signed video and alert metadata carried in plain CAP 1.2, plus a signed template library.
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.
Deaf people have been the crash-test bodies of every warning failure. We would rather be its engineers.
An alert designed for the body that hears nothing reaches every body.
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.
Morse code gave the world one shared rhythm language, and to this day everyone knows SOS. Nobody owns it. That is why it works.
A warning language has to be free in the same way, and as stable. Anyone may implement it at no cost, and a changed pattern is no longer this language: it is something else, and it must not carry the name. Changes are proposed in the open and versioned, because a shared language stays shared only while it stays the same.
Adopters and partners
Adopters and implementers
The first implementations are in progress. An organisation is listed here only once the Standard is live on its surface and it has agreed to be named.
Affiliations and coalitions
- International Member of the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD), with a Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2026.
- Member of the IASC Disability Reference Group.
- Affiliate member of the European Emergency Number Association (EENA), since October 2026.
- Founding participant in the IGF Dynamic Coalition DC-VPA (founding document adopted 6 October 2026). Participation in a dynamic coalition does not imply endorsement by IDE of its outputs.
- Speaker at the CAP Implementation Workshop 2026, Birmingham, 6 to 8 October 2026: “Alerts for All: making CAP alerts accessible at the source”.
Supporters
IDE’s work is funded by individual donors and by its emergency fund for Deaf communities.
Implementing the Standard? Tell 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 4.0, there is no membership and no royalty, and every release is archived with a citable DOI.
Can a broadcast overlay conform if it cannot add sound?
Yes. The Standard is emitted on three senses and survivable on one. An overlay that cannot add sound to the programme conforms when it carries the complete visual channel: the signed video with the signer fully in frame and never cropped or covered, one large pictogram, the hazard word and the action on caption bands, the severity wash never alone but with the triangles and the severity word, a bounded light cue of at most three flashes per second, the sender and the time, and the all-clear as a green wash with the circle mark. The sound is the broadcaster's decision, and the vibration goes to a paired phone or watch kept in step by the alert's CAP identifier. What an overlay may never do is shrink the alert to a text crawl.
Who writes the simple words on the caption band?
The alerting authority. The action in simple words a child can understand comes from the authority's own pre-approved template for that hazard and action, named in the CAP message. A broadcaster, an app or any other relay shows it unchanged and never rewrites it. Where no template exists, the relay shows the authority's instruction exactly as sent; if those words are hard, the fix is a better template upstream, never an edit downstream.