Every alert answers five questions, on every sense.
1. Is this an emergency?
An unmistakable signal, repeating until acknowledged. When the warning changes or ends, it alerts again.
2. How serious is it?
A four-step ladder spoken three ways at once: color, a count of marks, and vibration strength. The all-clear is silence.
3. What danger is it?
A small vocabulary of hazard families, each with a mimetic rhythm drawn from the hazard itself and from sign languages.
4. What should I do now?
The action first, in easy words, before any technical prose.
5. Where is more information, in my language?
Sign languages through human deaf signers, plus text, voice, and accessible formats. The first four answers are universal; the fifth is personal.
Each question must be answerable through sight alone, touch alone, and hearing alone, so a DeafBlind person gets every answer by touch, and a hearing person in a loud factory gets them by sight.
One language, many devices.
The rhythms are semantic, not device-bound. The same learned language can render on a phone, a smartwatch, a television, connected home lighting, and, in time, building alarms. Today every alarm says only danger. But fire means GO OUT, tornado means TAKE COVER, and tsunami means GO UP. A hazard vocabulary is what lets any light tell any person, deaf or hearing, which way to run.