Every alert answers five questions.
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 an affirmative release, a gentle cue plus calm words naming what ended, never just 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, speech, and accessible formats. The first four answers are universal; the fifth is personal.
The attention facts, that an emergency exists, how serious it is, and which danger family, are carried by every channel together. That an emergency exists and which danger family must be detectable through sight alone, touch alone, or hearing alone, so a DeafBlind person feels the danger and a hearing person in a loud factory sees it. How serious it is travels wherever a single channel can grade it: four distinct strengths of vibration, and light and tone that stay gentle for a minor warning and reach full strength for anything more serious. The full warning, including what to do, is guaranteed in accessible language: text, speech, sign language, braille. No essential part of a warning depends on any single sensory feature.
One language, many devices.
The rhythms are semantic, not device-bound. One shared rhythm for all: blind and partially sighted people receive it through sound, Deaf and hard of hearing people through light and vibration, DeafBlind people through touch, and everyone benefits from every channel. The same learned language can render on a phone, a smartwatch, a television, connected home lighting, and, in time, building alarms. A hazard vocabulary is what lets any light or tone tell any person, deaf or hearing, what is coming, so the action, given in words, is understood in a second.
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 this standard supplies. Fire means GO OUT, tornado means TAKE COVER, tsunami means GO UP, and each one now has a rhythm of its own to say so.
Nobody owns a rhythm.
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 only works if it is the same everywhere, like the siren. So the vocabulary and the code are free to implement, royalty free, forever, and the rhythms themselves are versioned and governed rather than owned. Anyone may build this. Nobody may change what FIRE feels like and still call it Three Senses.
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.
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.