The FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau has released a Report and Order to advance the availability of Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) for individuals with limited English proficiency. The FCC will require commercial mobile service providers that participate in WEA (Participating CMS Providers) to implement multilingual templates that alert originators can choose to send during emergencies. The FCC has created templates for the 18 most commonly issued and most time-sensitive alerts, which will be available in English and the next 13 most commonly spoken languages in the U.S. In addition, the FCC has adopted non-fillable American Sign Language (ASL) templates as signed by a Certified Deaf Interpreter (CDI).
