Emergency Access Advisory Committee Report on Gaps in NENA i3 NG 9-1-1 Specifications Related to EAAC Accessibility Reports

The Emergency Access Advisory Committee (EAAC) has worked since January 2011 to provide advice on accessibility of NG9-1-1 emergency services. As part of that work, EAAC has made efforts to foresee emergency accessibility requests and uses by persons with disabilities when NG9-1-1 is deployed.

EAAC has not constrained the examination to the functionality included in existing specifications of NG9-1-1, but has looked at the functional requirements and services required to support the needs of persons with disabilities. There are a number of gaps in the NENA i3 specification that need to be addressed before the EAAC recommendations can be implemented. Areas that require further attention include: support for interpreting, translating and other types of communications assistance services; handling of multimedia calls, support for text-based conversations, interoperability of voice calls, and support for TTY calls. This report on NENA i3 gaps does not claim to be comprehensive. Rather, it focuses on gaps that have become apparent during the work of the EAAC.