Most software for interpreting agencies is built by people who have watched interpreting from a distance — through market research, customer interviews, and the occasional site visit. IMP is built differently, and the difference is one sentence long: Frederick Interpreting Agency is a Deaf-owned interpreting agency, and the same team that dispatches interpreters, manages rosters, and sends invoices is the team that builds this platform.
That sentence sounds like a founding story. In practice, it's an engineering methodology. Here's what it changes.
Visual-first is not a feature request
When the owner of the company experiences the world visually, "accessible" stops being a checklist item reviewed before launch and becomes the water the product swims in. Communication in a Deaf-owned agency is visual by default — so the software's job is to make the state of the operation visible, not narrated. Schedules you can read at a glance. Statuses that announce themselves by shape and color, with text carrying the meaning rather than sound. Nothing important that lives only in an audio cue.
The quiet consequence: design decisions that are essential for Deaf users turn out to be simply better for everyone. A dispatcher in a loud office, an interpreter checking their phone in a hospital corridor, an admin on mute in a meeting — every one of them benefits from an interface that assumes the eyes are doing the work.
ASL work is the center, not an edge case
Plenty of scheduling tools treat interpreting as a generic staffing problem and signed languages as a checkbox within it. Run an actual agency and the picture inverts: ASL assignments come with their own non-negotiables. Video-capable dispatch, because a signed language can never be served over an audio line. Credential tracking that takes certification seriously. Team assignments for long or demanding jobs. The distinction between a request that can flex modality and one that absolutely cannot.
Building inside a Deaf-owned agency means those requirements were in the foundation, not discovered in a support ticket from an early customer. The platform handles spoken-language work with the same machinery — but it was never designed as if spoken-language phone work were the default and everything else a variation.
The feedback loop is measured in days
Every software company says it listens to users. Listening has latency, though: a frustration has to survive being noticed, articulated, submitted, triaged, prioritized, and scheduled before anyone builds the fix. At most companies that pipeline is measured in quarters.
When the dispatch desk and the development desk belong to the same team, the pipeline mostly disappears. A workflow that wastes clicks on Monday is a fix that ships within days — because the person it was wasting clicks on has the commit access. The feature list stops being a wishlist negotiated between departments and becomes a running record of what a real agency needed next. And every feature arrives pre-tested by the least forgiving user there is: an operator whose own payroll depends on it working.
Every feature ships to ourselves first. If it can’t survive our own dispatch desk, it never reaches yours.
How the loop closes
What this means if you run an agency
You don't have to be Deaf-owned for any of this to matter to you. The point is alignment: software built inside a working agency inherits that agency's incentives. It has to make the daily operation — scheduling, dispatch, interpreter pay, client invoicing — genuinely faster, because its own builders live inside that operation every day. It has to treat interpreters as first-class users, because the builders answer to interpreters personally. And it has to keep accessibility structural rather than cosmetic, because for its owners, that was never optional.
Modern software didn't change what our agency does. It changed how much of the day goes to the work itself instead of to the tools — and that's the standard we hold the platform to, one dispatch shift at a time.