AccesSOS uses PagerDuty to Break Down Barriers to 911 Emergency Services

Breaking Down 911 Barriers: accesSOS Builds Technology and Trust with PagerDuty

Family Emergency Sparks a Solution to Bridge Gaps in 911 Accessibility

Gabriella Wong, founder and executive director of accessSOS, grew up as a child of deaf adults (CODA), navigating a world where she felt parents were often overlooked by systems designed for those who could hear. The inequities became painfully clear when her father, an Asian immigrant, suffered a gallbladder rupture while home alone and was unable to call for an ambulance using the voice-based 911 system. Weak and in severe pain, he ended up driving himself to the emergency room. “He survived,” she says, “but it was terrifying.”

Despite the push for modernizing emergency systems, only about half of the U.S. 911 call centers in 2025 can receive text messages, according to the Federal Communications Commission, and some are only able to receive text messages in English. The rest remain voice-and English-centric, creating barriers to emergency services for millions of Americans who are deaf, hard of hearing, or have limited English proficiency.

In response to her family’s terrifying experience, Gabriella founded accessSOS, a nonprofit whose icon-based app allows users to contact emergency services without speaking or typing at all. Initially aimed at deaf and hard-of-hearing users, it is also useful for users with limited or no English language skills and people in unsafe situations where speaking could increase danger. Her mission: to make 911 more accessible for everyone. 

The Burden of Manual Monitoring: When App Downtime Could Mean Life or Death

After launching the lifesaving app, the accesSOS team had to manually monitor systems to ensure the organization’s service remained available to users 24/7– an incredibly stressful and time-consuming task. Any downtime could prevent someone from getting critical help in an emergency, making app reliability a matter of life and death. Reactive monitoring and the inability to detect issues or outages before they occurred were inefficient and unsustainable. 

Technical demands grew as the demand for accesSOS grew beyond its pilot city of Santa Fe, New Mexico. “I was constantly refreshing the app just to see if it was still up,” said Wong. “The team didn’t have tools in place to monitor downtime or catch issues before users did.” Recognizing the need for a more reliable solution, the team turned to PagerDuty. 

Reliable Technology When It’s Needed Most

PagerDuty transformed accesSOS’s incident management by replacing manual monitoring with automated, real-time alerting infrastructure. The new system ensures immediate notification of outages or performance issues before users are affected, enabling the accesSOS team to provide a reliable service that people can trust in their moments of crisis. “PagerDuty removed the guesswork,” Wong noted, highlighting the system’s effectiveness. The solution eliminated operational anxiety—constant manual refreshing that previously consumed hours now happens automatically. 

When a system overload recently caused performance issues, PagerDuty immediately notified lead software engineer Phaneendra Amruthur Ravi, allowing the team to respond quickly and prevent a complete service outage. “That alert changed everything,” Ravi emphasized. “Without it, we might’ve gone down at the worst possible moment, without even knowing.” With PagerDuty, the accesSOS team has system-wide visibility into the health and end-to-end operations of their critical public service.

Advancing Access to Emergency Services with Responsible AI

Today, accesSOS is available in California and New Mexico, with plans for national expansion. As it scales its infrastructure with PagerDuty, the organization is exploring ways to leverage AI with care, caution, and the community in mind. The team is currently developing AI-powered projects to improve communications on the app and scale their services safely and securely. Their new AI-powered prototype streamlines emergency reporting by automatically sharing vital information with dispatchers. 

When users contact 911 through the app, it instantly sends pre-saved health and location details—medical conditions, entry instructions—ensuring faster, more informed response. This solution is designed to improve quality of reporting, reliability, and cost-effectiveness. It goes through verification and validation, contingencies, extensive research, and guardrails. accesSOS is also implementing live, on device text translations so that users can report emergencies in their preferred non-English language, with the message instantly translated into English for dispatchers. In an emergency, real-time translation helps eliminate language barriers, ensuring critical information reaches responders without delay. This feature leverages the ML capabilities of both iOS and Android devices.

While they see huge potential, accesSOS is approaching AI with deliberate ethical data safeguards and only implementing AI with trusted partners when the value is clear. “We’re a nonprofit,” said Wong. “We’re not here to collect and sell data—we’re here to help.”

Emergency Communication That Meets People Where They Are

accesSOS’s life-saving tech solution simplifies messaging to emergency services, especially for those who are deaf, hard of hearing or do not speak English, making contacting 911 more accessible for everyone. With support from the PagerDuty Operations Cloud and PagerDuty.org grant funding, the team will serve the growing demand for its service, expanding to more communities affected by climate-related disasters and public safety threats. To do this, the organization is strengthening its back-end infrastructure for real-time responsiveness, improving system uptime, and alerting in high-traffic emergency periods. 

“We’re a nonprofit that people depend on when their lives are on the line,” Wong said. “We can’t afford downtime. PagerDuty helps us stay ready.”

PagerDuty is committed to supporting our nonprofit partners. Learn how PagerDuty can automate, orchestrate, and accelerate urgent work at your mission-driven organization. Sign up for your free 14-day trial today.