The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau's January 8, 2025 Report and Order advances the availability of Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) for persons with limited English proficiency.
The Report and Order requires commercial mobile service providers that participate in WEA to implement multilingual templates that alert originators can choose to send during life-threatening emergencies: "We adopt templates that represent the eighteen most commonly issued and most timesensitive types of alerts, which will be available in English and the next 13 most commonly spoken languages in the United States. We promote the flexibility and effectiveness of these templates by requiring Participating CMS Providers to support the ability for alert originators to customize the alerts using event-specific information."
Bean and colleagues' research on mobile public warning is extensively cited in support of the Report and Order.