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.

See the reference app Work with us on the standard

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.

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.

The Standard applies to any device that has a screen, a loudspeaker or a vibration motor, alone or in combination: phones and watches, televisions and set-top boxes, in-car displays, digital signage, outdoor warning sirens, building alert systems (fire alarm panels, strobe and horn notification appliances, evacuation announcements, lobby displays, the building's own lighting, and the screen, the chime and the cabin light of a lift) and smart lights. A device renders the channels it has and leaves the others to the devices around it; together they carry one rhythm.

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 a fully accessible alert screen looks like

Here is the layout, element by element. Below is one alert, a Water alert at Severe (ACT NOW), drawn on a phone, a television and a watch. The numbers on each screen match the list underneath.

Phone, portrait

Television, 16:9

Watch, 1:1Element 1, the signed video, is absent on the watch.

A device renders the channels it has (the watch shows the pictogram, the triangles and the rhythm; the television adds the signed video and the sound) and together they carry one rhythm.

1
The signed video
The authority's own signed video, carried in the alert as a CAP resource. It is shown large, with the signer fully in frame, never cropped and never covered. On the watch this element is absent.
2
One giant pictogram
One large picture of the hazard, so the danger reads at a glance.
3
The hazard word and the action
The hazard word and what to do, in simple words a child can understand: short sentences, no jargon, on white-on-black caption bands. The authority's full text stays one "tell me more" away.
FLOOD. Go up high. Stay there.
Tell me more
The authority’s own text it replaces (example): Flash Flood Warning in effect for this area until 18:00. Persons in low-lying areas should move to higher ground immediately and avoid flooded roads and underpasses.
4
The severity colour, as the wash
The severity colour fills the screen behind everything. It never works alone: the triangles and the word say the same level.
5
The severity triangles and word
White triangles whose count is the severity (1 at BE CAREFUL, 2 at DANGER COMING, 3 at ACT NOW), with the severity word above them.
6
The light cue
A light cue on the shared rhythm, inside the photosensitivity limits: never more than 3 flashes or 6 state changes per second, with a steady-light path for people who are photosensitive. A bounded indicator, never a full-screen flash.
7
The sound
The sound plays the same shared rhythm that the light shows and the hand feels, so the people nearby hear what the screen shows.
8
Replay, sender and time
A replay control (on a screen without controls, a repeat on a schedule), who sent the alert, and when. When the danger ends, the all-clear: a green wash, the circle mark, calm words naming what ended, and no alarm.

Television, signage and broadcast overlays

Televisions, set-top boxes and digital signage are inside the Standard’s device scope. Some of these screens have no buttons, and a broadcast overlay often cannot add sound to the programme. A broadcaster designing an overlay asked us what the screen above becomes there. Four rules answer, drawn on the same television and marked A to D.

Broadcast overlay, 16:9, marked A to D

A
A repeat on a schedule, in place of replay
Where the screen has no replay and no "tell me more" control, as on linear television, signage and public displays, the whole alert repeats on a schedule while it is active. The operator declares the interval, and it is never longer than five minutes. Every cycle shows the authority's full text, as a second screen or a crawl, so "tell me more" becomes "it comes back with everything". An all-clear is shown at least twice. Streaming and IPTV screens that can offer controls keep the replay and the "tell me more" control.
B
An overlay keeps every picture; the sound is the broadcaster's decision
A graphics overlay that cannot add sound to the programme audio 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, the light cue, the sender and the time, and the all-clear as a green wash with the circle mark. Whether sound plays is the broadcaster's decision. The vibration goes to a paired phone or watch, kept in step by the alert's own CAP identifier. Emitted on three senses, survivable on one: that is why a silent overlay can conform. What it may never do is shrink the alert to a text crawl.
C
Light that never floods the screen
On a television or a public display the light cue never becomes full-screen flashing: at most three flashes per second, in a bounded area rather than the whole screen, and a steady or slow pulse rather than any strobe. Three flashes per second is the general flash threshold of WCAG 2.3.1; broadcasters also observe ITU-R BT.1702 and their national rules. The light follows the shared rhythm of the three channels rather than competing with it.
D
A relay never rewrites
A relay shows the authority's text unchanged. The action in simple words a child can understand comes from the alerting authority's own pre-approved template for that hazard and action, named in the CAP message by a template identifier or event code, never from a rewrite downstream. Where no template exists, the relay shows the authority's instruction exactly as sent and does not simplify it: the fix for hard words is a better template upstream. Never guess, never rewrite.

For alerting authorities: building a signed template library

The signed video in element 1 is the authority’s own clip for the hazard and the action, made and approved before any alert is sent. Most countries do not have these clips yet. This is the path.

A small vocabulary first: the hazard families and the all-clear, about twenty clips.
A Deaf signer native in the national sign language, a Deaf interpreter rather than a hearing one where possible.
Review by the national Deaf association before any encoding.
The alerting authority approves each clip as its own message.
Clips are issued to receivers in advance, verified by the CAP resource digest, so a television plays a verified clip from its own storage with the network down.
Every clip is versioned and re-approved when the template text changes.

The expensive part is the approval loop, not the filming: start it first.

Precedent: the FCC’s 2025 order adopted eighteen WEA templates in thirteen written languages and in American Sign Language, produced by FEMA with Deaf signers, device support due by June 2028; no authority-approved per-hazard signed library outside the United States is known to IDE as of October 2026.

Read the guide: Building a signed template library, in the Three Senses repository

The same alert at every level

The same Water alert at all four levels. The colour, the number of triangles and the word change together. Across the three danger levels the picture and the rhythm stay the same; at SAFE NOW the alarm rhythm stops and the calm all-clear takes over.

SAFE NOW
no triangles, the circle mark
BE CAREFUL
1 triangle
DANGER COMING
2 triangles
ACT NOW
3 triangles

Right and wrong

Wrong: colour only

A plain ACT NOW colour. No level, no danger, nothing for a colour-blind reader.

Right: the Standard’s layout

Colour plus shape plus word: the pictogram, 3 triangles and ACT NOW.

Colour never works alone

Is your alert screen fully accessible?

Twelve yes-or-no questions for implementers. Every answer should be yes.

Is the authority's signed video, carried as a CAP resource, shown large, with the signer fully in frame and never cropped or covered?
Is there one giant pictogram for the hazard?
Are the hazard word and the action given in simple words a child can understand, on white-on-black caption bands, with the full text behind a "tell me more" control?
Is the severity colour the wash behind everything, and never the only sign of the level?
Do white triangles show the severity by their count, with the severity word above them?
Is the light cue a bounded indicator inside the photosensitivity limits, never a full-screen flash?
Does the sound play the shared rhythm?
Does the screen show who sent the alert and when?
Can the alert be replayed?
Where the screen has no replay control, does the whole alert repeat while it is active, at a declared interval of five minutes or less, with the authority's full text in every cycle?
Are the simple words the authority's own pre-approved template, shown unchanged and never rewritten downstream?
Is the all-clear a green wash with the circle mark, calm words naming what ended, and no alarm?

Captured from the reference app

Real screenshots of Deaflare, the reference app, taken on an iPhone simulator on 9 October 2026: the same drill alert at three severity levels, and a second hazard at Extreme. Colour, triangles and the severity word move together; the hazard word, the pictogram and the controls stay where they are.

Deaflare full-screen takeover for a test flood alert at Extreme: a red wash, the words TEST ONLY and This is a test, the severity word EXTREME, three white triangles, the hazard word FLOOD on a black band, a large wave pictogram, a line saying the alert repeats until I UNDERSTAND is pressed, the expiry time, and the buttons Tell me more, Send to someone, Listen and I understand. — Flood at Extreme, a test alert as Deaflare renders it: severity colour, severity word, three triangles, hazard word, pictogram, replay and understanding controls.

Deaflare full-screen takeover for a test storm alert at Severe: an orange wash, the words TEST ONLY and This is a test, the severity word SEVERE, three black triangles, the hazard word STORM on a black band, a large spiral storm pictogram, a line saying the alert repeats until I UNDERSTAND is pressed, the expiry time, and the buttons Tell me more, Send to someone, Listen and I understand. — Storm at Severe, the same drill one level down: orange instead of red, dark triangles instead of white, a different hazard word and pictogram, everything else in the same place.

Deaflare full-screen takeover for a drill at Moderate: a yellow wash, the words TEST ONLY and This is a test, the severity word MODERATE, two dark triangles and one faint one, the word TEST on a black band, a test-tube pictogram, a line saying the alert repeats until I UNDERSTAND is pressed, the expiry time, and the buttons Tell me more, Send to someone, Listen and I understand. — The drill at Moderate: yellow, two triangles out of three, and the drill's own honest face, the word TEST, so nobody mistakes a practice screen for a hazard.

Deaflare full-screen takeover for a test earthquake alert at Extreme: a red wash, the words TEST ONLY and This is a test, the severity word EXTREME, three white triangles, the hazard word EARTHQUAKE on a black band, a large mountain pictogram, a line saying the alert repeats until I UNDERSTAND is pressed, the expiry time, and the buttons Tell me more, Send to someone, Listen and I understand. — Earthquake at Extreme: the same red and the same three white triangles as the flood, so severity reads the same across hazards; only the word and the pictogram change.

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.

GROUND
earthquake, landslide
one long pulse that does not let go
WATER
flood, tsunami, storm surge
long, rolling pulses that keep coming
STORM
cyclone, typhoon, tornado, severe storm
three sharp pulses
FIRE
fire, wildfire
ten fast pulses, nothing else is this fast
THREAT
danger from people (attack, active threat, missing child)
one hard knock, one long push, five rapid fires, then a full stop
TEST
test or drill, never a real emergency
a gentle double tap, a long quiet, then again: checking, not warning
OTHER
any hazard outside the named families (health, chemical, infrastructure)
three steady calls, evenly spaced, for what has no shape of its own
ALL CLEAR
the danger has ended (an affirmative, authenticated update)
one long soft press easing away, then a short settling one, never looped

Each drawing is one full cycle, read from the published SDK when the page is built: filled bars are pulses, empty space is quiet, and every family shares the same seconds scale.

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.

These rhythms come from sign languages. Deaf people have carried the shape of danger in our hands for centuries. Now that knowledge can save everyone.

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.

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.

Work with us on the standard

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.

Adopt it, test it, or write it with us

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-ND 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.