Most government meeting video
is out of compliance.
Here's why that matters.
ADA Title II now requires WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility for all digital government content — including meeting video. The gap between what's legally required and what most agencies actually have is large, costly to close manually, and growing.
Auto-captions don't meet the standard
YouTube's automatic captions perform poorly on local names, civic terms, and ordinance language — the exact content that matters. ADA requires accuracy that platform auto-captions consistently fail to deliver.
Audio description is missing everywhere
WCAG 1.2.5 requires narration of important on-screen visuals — slides, charts, documents — for blind and low-vision residents. It is one of the most commonly required and least commonly provided accessibility features in government video.
Dense minutes aren't truly accessible
Publishing a PDF satisfies the open-meetings law — but a wall of bureaucratic language is inaccessible to residents who need plain English, and a scanned image PDF fails WCAG entirely. Technical compliance is only half the obligation.
The DOJ rule is specific.
Aware Compliance meets every criterion.
The 2024 DOJ final rule mandates WCAG 2.1 Level AA for all state and local government digital content — including meeting video. Here's every time-based media criterion your meetings must satisfy, and how Aware delivers each one automatically, from day one.
Section numbers (1.2.1–1.2.5) are individual success criteria within WCAG 2.1 — not the version number.
Captions, transcript, audio description, sufficient color contrast, text alternatives for all non-text content.
Full keyboard navigation, skip links, visible focus indicators, no keyboard traps, accessible video controls.
Plain-language summaries, consistent navigation, clear labels and instructions throughout the portal.
Semantic HTML and ARIA markup, verified with automated accessibility testing. Zero known violations on publish.
Be live and compliant
within days — not months.
Most agencies connect YouTube or Zoom and are live on a WCAG 2.1 AA conformant portal within 1–3 business days. Connect, review, publish — and get ahead of the deadline now.
Aware Compliance makes your meeting video — and the portal that delivers it — WCAG 2.1 AA conformant, covering the time-based media criteria that are the hardest and most-cited under the DOJ rule. ADA Title II compliance across your organization's full digital presence remains the agency's responsibility.
From video to fully accessible portal — automatically
Connect once. Every new meeting runs through the full pipeline on its own.
Connect your source
Link your YouTube channel, connect Zoom, or upload video files directly. No equipment, no AV setup, no IT team. Works with what you already have.
Add your Names & Places
Upload your roster of officials, staff, and local place names once. Aware tunes its recognition so civic terms are spelled and heard correctly — not garbled like raw auto-captions.
Pipeline runs automatically
When a new meeting is detected, Aware processes it end-to-end: accurate captions, audio description, interactive transcript, and plain-language summary — no manual steps.
Review and publish
Your town manager reviews the output in a simple dashboard, then publishes with one click. Residents immediately see the accessible portal — live and WCAG 2.1 AA from day one.
Six capabilities. One platform.
Everything an agency needs to meet WCAG 2.1 AA — and give residents a public record they can actually use.
Accurate Captions & Interactive Transcript
Speech-to-text tuned to your town's roster of officials, staff, and local places. The transcript is fully searchable and scrolls with the video as it plays.
Audio Description
Automatically narrates important on-screen visuals — slides, charts, shared documents — for blind and low-vision residents. Meets WCAG 1.2.5, the requirement almost every government meeting fails today.
Plain-Language Summaries
AI-generated, topic-by-topic recaps so residents understand what happened in minutes — not hours. No legalese. No editorializing. Just what was decided and why it matters.
Ask Aware — AI Q&A
Residents and staff type a question in plain English and get an answer with a link to the exact moment — across every meeting video and document for your town. Find anything, instantly.
Branded Resident Portal
Each town gets its own WCAG 2.1 AA public portal at a subdomain. Residents watch, read, skim summaries, and search — all from one clean, accessible page on any device.
Names & Places Correction
UniqueFix a name once — it propagates across captions, transcript, and summaries, for new meetings and retroactively across your imported archive. Your public record is always accurate and defensible.
Compliance clears the audit.
This builds the relationship.
The ADA mandates accessible content. Aware goes further — giving every resident tools that make civic life genuinely easier to follow. That's not just compliance. That's goodwill.
Residents read the AI-generated meeting summary. If the language is still confusing — budget motions, zoning amendments, legal references — they click Aware Explain and get the entire summary rewritten in plain, everyday language. No legal background needed.
Residents and staff type a question in plain English and get a direct answer — drawn from every meeting video and document your town has published. Ask Aware searches your whole archive and links straight to the exact moment, or the source page. No digging through minutes. No video scrubbing.
The optional add-on that turns Ask Aware loose on the largest corpus of local-government meeting records ever assembled — 3,300+ U.S. communities, plus Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. See how peers handled the same zoning fight, budget shortfall or ordinance — grounded in their official record. Unique data no other tool has.
When residents can understand what happened and ask their own questions, engagement rises. Officials get more informed, less frustrated constituents. That goodwill doesn't show up in a WCAG audit — but it's the difference between a portal people ignore and one they actually use.
Built for Government.
Every meeting is reviewed, corrected, and published on your terms — through a portal designed for government staff, not software engineers.
Civic intelligence,
without borders.
Ask Aware answers questions from your meetings. Atlas extends it to the largest corpus of local government meeting records ever assembled — 3,300+ U.S. communities, plus Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Every answer cites the official record. The source, not the slant.
One product. Not five vendors.
Most agencies patch together a captioning vendor, a transcription service, an audio-description contractor, a summarization tool, and a portal — each with its own contract, invoice, and hand-off point where things break.
Still probably not fully compliant.
Runs itself after setup.
Built for the people who run it.
And the people who need it.
Set it up in an afternoon.
Let it run forever.
No project, no consultant, no ripping out what you have. Connect your channel, add your Names & Places, and Aware handles the rest — automatically, meeting after meeting.
Years of recordings are out of compliance right now.
ADA Title II compliance isn't just about new meetings. Every existing video, every prior session, every archived recording is subject to the same WCAG requirements. Most agencies have years of backlog they've never addressed.
Aware Compliance is built for bulk import at volume. Connect your archive — whether it's on YouTube, Zoom, a shared drive, or local storage — and the pipeline processes your full backlog automatically. You don't start over; you catch up.
Ready to make every meeting accessible to every resident?
Most agencies connect their channel and are live on a fully conformant WCAG 2.1 AA portal within 1–3 business days. No project plan, no consultants, no months of work. Connect, review, publish — and meet your deadline with time to spare.