Live Captioning Accessibility for City Meetings ($250,000)

Committee: Community Resources

Cost: $250,000

Location: City-owned buildings, public meeting spaces for up to three years.

Short Description: Let's make public meetings more accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people! This proposal will fund portable screens and staffing for live transcriptions of public meetings in city-owned buildings. 

Long Description: 

Live captioning (CART) is vital for making events accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people. Captions are also helpful to a much wider audience, including:

• People with other disabilities, such as auditory processing disorders, learning disabilities, and chronic fatigue

• English language learners

• Emerging readers

• People who are visual learners

• Anyone who struggles to hear and understand speech in noise or in poor acoustics.

CART captioning is not currently provided for many community meetings, and meetings are usually held in rooms with only one projection screen. These screens are used to display slideshows, so they are not available for streaming captions. People who attend city meetings are not provided with captioning to help them understand what is being said.  

We can help more people take part in public and community meetings run by the city by:

• Contracting with a vendor to provide CART captioning for more public meetings and events. The contract will allow for the CART captions to be projected in the meeting space for people attending in-person and viewed through virtual meeting platforms such as Zoom. Participants in online or hybrid meetings can also stream the CART captions in a browser on their personal devices.

• Purchasing 2-3 rolling/portable screens to project CART captioning in city building rooms. The mobile screens can be moved to different locations and around the meeting space to fit the room setup and the audience’s needs. 

This proposal will benefit a wide audience, both with and without disabilities. It will advance the city's commitment to inclusion and language justice. It will also help us meet our Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) obligation to provide effective communication for disabled residents. Making information accessible to all will enable full engagement. Public meetings will have more inclusive, community-representative engagement.

An example of CART captioning being used during an event in the Sullivan Chamber in City Hall.