Aware LensAI-first · Mobile-first · ADA Title II · WCAG 2.1 AA
Compliant by April. Modern by Monday.
The AI-first platform for the entire public meeting — agenda, livestream, votes, minutes, searchable documents, meeting summaries (read about what happened at the meeting in seconds), and support for eight languages. Built to meet ADA Title II. Built to give your staff their week back. Built so every resident knows what their government decided — on their computer, phone and Apple TV.
April 26, 2027 for entities serving 50,000+. April 26, 2028 for everyone else.
For towns, cities, counties, school districts, public colleges, commissions and state agencies — any government entity that publishes meeting video.
Built for every public entity ADA Title II covers.
ADA Title II applies to state and local government — every department, agency, board and commission, the commissions they form, and the public school districts and colleges they fund. If your body holds public meetings, the video you post must meet WCAG 2.1 AA, and Aware Lens runs the whole meeting around it.
Towns & cities
Cities, towns, townships, villages and boroughs — councils, committees and every board that meets in public.
For Municipal clerks, town managers, business administrators.
Counties
Boards of commissioners and supervisors, and county boards and authorities.
For Clerks to the board, county administrators.
School districts
Boards of education and public school board meetings.
For Board secretaries, business administrators.
Public colleges & universities
Boards of trustees, regents and governors of publicly funded institutions.
For Board secretaries, general counsel.
Commissions
Any commission formed by a state, county, town or school district — planning, zoning, housing, historic preservation and more.
For Commission secretaries, executive directors.
Authorities & special districts
Transit, utility, housing, fire, water and other special-purpose governments.
For Executive directors, board secretaries.
State governments
Executive agencies, legislative committees and hearings, and the judicial branch.
For Agency clerks, legislative staff, court administrators.
Any public entity that publishes video
If you are a state or local government entity and you post or livestream meeting video, Title II applies to you.
For Anyone responsible for public meeting video.
Deadlines follow the population of the jurisdiction you serve: April 26, 2027 for entities serving 50,000 or more, and April 26, 2028 for those under 50,000 and special districts. See what ADA Title II requires → Guides for municipal clerks and town managers & business administrators.
Public meeting software, from posted agenda to public record.
Legacy vendors sell you a video host, an agenda tool, a caption contract and a translation line — and leave you to piece them together. Aware Lens is purpose-built and AI-first: every step of the meeting in one place. See how it’s priced.
Aware Lens Agenda
Learns the format you already publish. Immutable postings, addenda instead of edits.
Aware Lens Livestream
Live meetings with real-time captions from the encoder you already use.
Aware Lens Vote
Attendance, motions and roll call captured at the clerk’s seat — shown on the chamber display.
Aware Lens Minutes
Drafted from the transcript in your format, checked sentence by sentence. Never allowed to invent.
Aware Lens Comment
Prior to meetings, residents can comment on the agenda and/or sign up for public comment, straight into the clerk’s console.
Aware Lens Languages
The whole meeting page in eight languages, with names and figures protected.
Aware Lens Documents
Every document OCR’d — scans, charts and graphics included — and searchable to the exact page. Not a list of PDF links.
Ask Aware
Plain-English questions, answered from your record and cited to the moment.
Ask Aware Atlas
How 3,800+ peer communities handled the same issue.
Aware Capture
Record meeting audio; transcribed and published for you.
Aware Access
Resident apps for iPhone, Android and Apple TV.
Start with the platform. Add the modules you need.
Aware Lens has a base price, set by the number of videos you process, and optional modules you add at any time. Your data can always be exported into common formats.
Step 1 · The base platform — priced by videos processed
Compliant video hosting
Every meeting video made accessible for ADA Title II and WCAG 2.1 AA: accurate captions, synced transcript, audio description and an accessible player on your portal.
Video hosting with AI summaries & document search
Everything in compliant hosting, plus topic-by-topic AI meeting summaries residents read in seconds, and every attached document searchable to the exact page.
Step 2 · Add modules
Agenda
Agendas in your existing format, posted as immutable versions.
Livestream
Live meetings with real-time captions from the encoder you already use.
Vote
Attendance and roll call at the clerk’s seat, on the chamber display and stream.
Minutes
Minutes drafted from the transcript in your format, checked line by line.
Comment
Email-confirmed public comment and speaker sign-up.
Languages
The whole meeting page in eight languages, names and figures protected.
Ask Aware
Residents and staff ask plain-English questions and get answers from your own record, cited to the exact moment.
Ask Aware Atlas
An internal tool for administrators: how 3,800+ peer communities handled the same issue, cited to their official record. Requires Ask Aware.
Aware Capture
A recording app for agencies that only need to capture meeting audio — recorded, transcribed and published to your portal.
Aware Access
Resident apps for iPhone, Android and Apple TV — video and summaries, with a notification when a meeting publishes.
The only meeting platform on all three screens residents use.
Computer, phone and Apple TV — and not just the video. Every plain-language summary, answer and vote reaches residents wherever they already are, with a push notification the moment a meeting is published. Legacy portals stop at a desktop web page.
Your portal
- Video with captions, transcript & audio description
- Topic-by-topic summaries and Ask Aware
- Every document searchable to the page
Aware Access for iPhone & Android
- Summaries first — the video is one tap away
- Push: “your meeting summary is ready”
- Eight languages, set once
Aware Access for Apple TV
- Council meetings in the living room, captions on
- Summaries on the big screen, not just playback
- Browse every body and every meeting
Designed around people, not files.
AI does the work of turning a three-hour meeting into something a resident can read on a phone in three minutes. Mobile-first design puts it in their pocket. One accessible experience — WCAG 2.1 AA on every screen.
Government video hosting is a relic.
For twenty years “government video” meant a recording, a server and a player bolted to the government website — the legacy government web platform providers. Different logos, same filing cabinet. That era is over.
| The meeting | 1998 – 2026 · Government web platform providersThe hosting era | 2026 – · The communications eraAware Lens |
|---|---|---|
| The recording | Stored behind a player | Summaries, answers & an accessible record |
| Captions | Auto-captions — names garbled | Tuned to your agency from day one |
| Audio description | None — WCAG 1.2.5 fails | Every meeting, automatic |
| 15 minutes to spare | Scrub 3 hours of tape | Read the digest, jump to the moment |
| Resident questions | Unanswered | Ask Aware — cited to the second |
| Where residents watch | A desktop web page | Web + iPhone, Android & Apple TV, with push alerts |
| Data for decisions | None | Aware Atlas — 3,800+ towns & cities |
| ADA Title II | Your problem | Handled & documented |
| Contracts | Five vendors, five invoices | One |
| Survived by a thousand unwatched videos. | Video as the way you speak to residents. |
AI meeting summaries: storage remembers, a lens resolves.
Township Attorney Cantor reported that the fourth-round compliance hearing scheduled for the next morning had been converted to a virtual case management conference to schedule a third-round fairness hearing for the amended settlement — avoiding immediate compliance litigation, consistent with the Fair Share Housing Center’s position.
This is the public record without Aware Lens — and with it. Move the lens across the text.
Three hours of meeting. Three minutes of reading.
Every session gets a topic-by-topic summary — what was decided, who voted how, what happens next. Filter by what matters: budgets, zoning, schools, public safety.
Govspeak, translated.
Open any topic for a short and a long summary. Still opaque? The Explain button rewrites it in plain, everyday words — same facts, no legalese, no editorializing.
Every answer, with the receipt.
Ask Aware answers plain-English questions from every meeting and document you have published — linked to the exact moment it was said. No minutes to dig through, no tape to scrub.
“When does the Main St crosswalk go in?”
August, per Public Works — approved 5–2 at the June 10 council meeting.
Aware Atlas
The superpower of information for administrators and managers — an internal tool built on the largest body of local-government decisions ever assembled. No web platform provider has it. No one else can build it.
across five countries — growing every week
Before your council votes, your administrators, managers and clerks can see how peer communities handled the same zoning fight, budget shortfall or ordinance — cited to their official record. Data no video host has, because a video host never listened.
“How have peer cities structured short-term rental permits?”
Permit caps by neighborhood density are most common. Boulder, CO tied renewals to owner-occupancy after a 6–1 vote; several councils added hardship waivers after public comment.
Ferndale, MI · Apr 2026 — Chapel Hill, NC · Jan 2026 — Bend, OR · Nov 2025 — Guelph, ON · Mar 2026
Right now, a council somewhere in those 3,800+ communities is debating the exact item on your next agenda. Atlas towns see how it ends. Everyone else waits for the minutes.
The ADA Title II deadline is written in the Federal Register.
The 2024 DOJ rule under ADA Title II requires WCAG 2.1 AA for government web content and mobile apps. After your date — April 26, 2027 if you serve 50,000 or more, April 26, 2028 if you serve fewer than 50,000 or are a special district — meeting video you provide or make available generally has to meet that standard.
ADA Title II meeting video — captions, audio description, the archived-content tests, and how clerks actually run it. Start with the clerk’s video checklist.
days until April 26, 2027Cities, counties & agencies serving 50,000+ population
days until April 26, 2028Under 50,000 population & special district governments
Auto-captions fail the standard
Worst on the local names and ordinance language that matter most (WCAG 1.2.2).
Audio description is missing
Narrating slides and charts for blind residents — the least-provided requirement in government video (WCAG 1.2.5).
A scanned PDF isn’t accessibility
Dense minutes satisfy the open-meetings law, not the ADA.
The five WCAG 1.2 criteria your video must meet — and how each is delivered
| Criterion | What it requires | Level | How Aware Lens delivers it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.2.1 Audio-only & video-only | A text alternative for prerecorded media | A | Full searchable transcript for every meeting. |
| 1.2.2 Captions (prerecorded) | Accurate synchronized captions | A | Captions tuned to your officials, places and civic vocabulary, with speaker identification. |
| 1.2.3 Audio description or alternative | Audio description or a full media alternative | A | Both: interactive transcript and full audio description. |
| 1.2.4 Captions (live) | Real-time captions for live streams | AA | Aware Lens Livestream — captions synchronized to the speaker, during the meeting. What 1.2.4 requires. |
| 1.2.5 Audio description (prerecorded) | Audio description for all prerecorded video | AA | AI narration of slides, charts and documents — the criterion almost every meeting fails today. |
Source: ADA.gov — 2024 DOJ Final Rule on Web Accessibility. The resident portal is conformant across all four WCAG principles, with a full audit trail for your records.
“A public entity shall ensure that web content it provides or makes available… complies with Level A and Level AA success criteria of WCAG 2.1.”
How it works: connect once, accessible every meeting after.
Most agencies are live on a WCAG 2.1 AA resident portal within 1–3 business days — no RFP, no consultants, no AV crew.
Connect your source
YouTube, Zoom or direct upload. No equipment, no IT project.
Add your Names & Places
Your roster of officials, staff and streets, once. Recognition is tuned before the first meeting.
The pipeline runs itself
Captions, description, transcript, summary — every new meeting, no manual steps.
Review and publish
Your clerk approves in one dashboard. Residents see it immediately.
Meeting accessibility, eight capabilities, one contract.
Captions & interactive transcript
Tuned to your roster; searchable, scrolls with the video.
Audio description
On-screen visuals narrated automatically. WCAG 1.2.5, met.
Plain-language summaries
Topic-by-topic recaps, with Aware Explain one click away.
Ask Aware — AI Q&A
Plain-English questions, answers linked to the exact moment.
Branded resident portal
Your own WCAG 2.1 AA portal, on any device.
Names & Places correction
Fix a name once — it propagates everywhere, retroactively.
Live meetings, real-time captions
Stream from your own encoder; residents watch with captions synced to the speaker. Aware Lens Livestream.
Searchable meeting documents
Every attachment is OCR’d — residents search to the exact page, even text inside a scan or a chart.
Built for clerks and managers, not engineers.
Review, correct and publish on your terms — with one login across every agency you manage.
- Review before you publish — edit inline, go live in one click
- Names & Places — correct once, propagates retroactively
- Sources & archive — YouTube, Zoom, upload; bulk-import years
- Full lifecycle — draft, schedule, publish, republish
- Master overview — every agency, one login
- Analytics — what residents watch and search
Your archive is out of compliance right now.
The rule covers your existing archive too — and most agencies have years of backlog. Connect it and the pipeline catches you up automatically.
- 2021 — 48 meetings recordedNo captions · out of compliance
- 2022–24 — 144 more meetingsAuto-captions · still failing
- Today — connect to Aware LensAll 192 queued automatically
- Days later — full archive liveWCAG 2.1 AA, searchable
Aware Capture: record your first meeting next week.
A plug-and-play tablet-and-mic kit captures, transcribes, summarizes and publishes straight to your portal — built for clerks, not IT.
Replace five meeting vendors with one platform.
The hosting era’s answer was a patchwork — a vendor per requirement, an invoice per vendor.
Without Aware Lens
- Captioning vendorContract № 1
- Human transcription serviceContract № 2
- Audio-description contractorContract № 3
- Summarization toolContract № 4
- Portal / website vendorContract № 5
Five invoices. Five hand-offs. Still probably not conformant.
With Aware Lens
- Captions, transcript & audio descriptionIncluded
- Plain-language summaries & Aware ExplainIncluded
- Ask Aware Q&A across your recordIncluded
- WCAG 2.1 AA branded resident portalIncluded
- Aware Atlas — 3,800+ communitiesAdd-on
One contract. Runs itself after setup.
ADA Title II & meeting software: what government buyers ask.
How is Aware Lens priced?
Aware Lens has a base price set by the number of videos you process, as either compliant video hosting or video hosting with AI summaries and document search. You then add the modules you need: Agenda, Livestream, Vote, Minutes, Comment, Languages, Ask Aware, Ask Aware Atlas, Aware Capture and the Aware Access apps. Your data can be exported into common formats.
Who does ADA Title II apply to?
ADA Title II applies to state and local governments and their departments, agencies, boards and commissions — including towns, cities, townships and villages, counties, public school districts, publicly funded colleges and universities, commissions formed by a state, county, town or school district, special districts, and state agencies across the executive, legislative and judicial branches — any state or local government entity that publishes meeting video. Meeting video they post or livestream must meet WCAG 2.1 AA: by April 26, 2027 for entities serving 50,000 or more, and April 26, 2028 for those under 50,000 and special districts.
What is the ADA Title II compliance deadline for local governments?
April 26, 2027 for public entities serving populations of 50,000 or more, and April 26, 2028 for smaller entities and special district governments. The 2024 DOJ final rule requires state and local government web content — including meeting video — to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Archived content is excepted only when all four of ADA.gov’s archived-web-content tests are true.
Do YouTube auto-captions satisfy WCAG 2.1 AA?
No. WCAG 1.2.2 requires accurate synchronized captions, and platform auto-captions consistently misrender local names, officials and ordinance language — the exact content that matters. They also provide no audio description, so WCAG 1.2.5 fails entirely. See why YouTube auto-captions don’t meet WCAG 1.2.2.
Do our archived meeting videos need to be accessible too?
ADA.gov’s fact sheet carves out archived web content only when all four of the following are true: (1) the content was created before your compliance date (or reproduces older physical media from before that date), and (2) it is kept only for reference, research, or recordkeeping, and (3) it is kept in a special area for archived content, and (4) it has not been changed since it was archived. Miss any one point and the exception generally does not apply. Video still listed on a live meetings page generally is not archived. Even excepted content can still require an accessible copy on request. The clerk-facing guide is ADA Title II meeting video.
How is Aware Lens different from government web platform providers?
Legacy government web platforms are video hosting: a recording, a server and a player attached to a website. Aware Lens is a communications and intelligence platform — every meeting automatically becomes accurate captions, audio description, a transcript, a plain-language summary and instant cited answers, published to a WCAG 2.1 AA portal, with benchmarking data from 3,800+ towns and cities behind it.
What is Aware Atlas?
An internal tool for administrators, managers and clerks — the superpower of information. It extends Ask Aware to the largest corpus of local-government meeting records ever assembled: 3,800+ towns and cities (3,300 in the US, plus Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand). Staff use it to see how peer communities handled the same question, with every answer cited to the official record. It is an optional add-on and stays separate from the meeting video we process for your own portal.
How fast can we go live?
Most agencies connect YouTube or Zoom and are live on a conformant portal within 1–3 business days — no RFP, no consultants, no AV project.
Do we need new cameras or AV equipment?
No. Aware Lens works with the recordings you already make — YouTube, Zoom or direct upload. Agencies that don’t record yet can use Aware Capture, a plug-and-play tablet-and-microphone kit built for clerks, not IT teams.
Is there a mobile app for residents?
Yes. Aware Access apps for iPhone, Android and Apple TV give residents every summary, video and answer — and send a push notification the moment a new meeting is published. The web portal stays fully accessible on any device.
Is the resident portal itself WCAG 2.1 AA conformant?
Yes — across all four principles: perceivable, operable, understandable and robust. Every correction is logged in a defensible audit trail.
See your own meetings through the lens.
A 30-minute demo with your actual meeting video — the summary, the answers and the compliance report, live, before you sign anything. Then be conformant within days, with 215 days of runway to spare.
- No IT setup required
- Works with YouTube, Zoom & direct upload
- Aware Access apps: iPhone · Android · Apple TV
- Pricing by archive size & population