FEMA Pulls Disability Material from Ready.gov

States, Local Governments, Territories, and Tribal Entities may have broken links and missing intelligence

AI generated image using phrase ‘people with disabilities information on a computer screen’

Sometime after January 21, 2025 – and without any notice – much of the disability-specific information located on the https://www.ready.gov/disabilities website was removed - including links, accessible videos and disability-specific preparedness information. As of 2/5/2025, some material has reappeared, but so far only in English and Spanish, and at https://www.ready.gov/people-disabilities

The /disabilities page was used regularly by emergency managers, local officials, non-profits and people with disabilities alike across the country as guidance on how to address the preparedness needs of the whole community. All that is left in its place now is picture and the link above to preparedness information. At one point it was simply a link to a brochure which was from a folder marked 2020. The web page itself seems to have been last updated on 09/26/2022.

This change has a significant impact on every state, local, territorial, and/or tribal government that simply reference links to Ready.gov for their community preparedness information, rather than recreating (or locally storing) national-level material. Those links may now be broken, removed, inaccessible or may reference only this single brochure.

Further, what is out there is only available in English and Spanish, and not the 10 other languages made available on the webpage prior to its removal.

Using the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/) we have located a backup from May 8, 2024 which appears to contain much of the deleted material and be in working order (other than the audio for the videos). This archived page can be viewed here https://web.archive.org/web/20240508180143/https://www.ready.gov/disability and includes options for multiple languages and associated content.

While the Wayback Machine has proven to be a reliable way to retrieve information from past websites, it does have limitations. As such, emergency managers may want to save these resources locally moving forward so that the public will retain access to the information no matter what.

Source: Jono Hey, Sketchplanations.com

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