Aware LensADA Title II · WCAG 2.1 AA · Built for local government
Government video, brought into focus.
Not another place to park meeting recordings. Every session becomes a plain-language summary, instant cited answers and a WCAG 2.1 AA public record — backed by intelligence from 3,800+ towns and cities.
WCAG 2.1 AA becomes mandatory April 26, 2027. Aware Lens gets you there in days, not budget cycles.
Video hosting is a relic.
For twenty years “government video” meant a recording, a server and a player bolted to the town 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 town 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 (ACR/VPAT) |
| Contracts | Five vendors, five invoices | One |
| Survived by a thousand unwatched videos. | Video as the way your town speaks. |
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 your town has 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.
Meetings in their pocket. And on their TV.
Residents don’t follow their town from a desktop portal. Aware Access brings every summary, video and answer to iPhone, Android and Apple TV — with a push notification the moment a meeting is published.
- iPhone & Android apps — the full portal, in their pocket
- Apple TV — council meetings in the living room, captions on
- Push notifications — “your meeting summary is ready,” the day it publishes
- One accessible experience — WCAG 2.1 AA on every screen
Aware Atlas
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, 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 deadline is written in the Federal Register.
The 2024 DOJ rule under ADA Title II requires WCAG 2.1 AA for all government digital content — including every meeting video you have ever published. A legal requirement, with a date.
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 | Supported for live-streamed meetings. |
| 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 an ACR/VPAT and 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.”
Connect once. Compliant 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.
Six 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 town’s own WCAG 2.1 AA portal, on any device.
Names & Places correction
Fix a name once — it propagates everywhere, retroactively.
Built for clerks and managers, not engineers.
Review, correct and publish on your terms — with one login across every town in a jurisdiction.
- 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 town, 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.
Five vendors, or one lens.
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.
What government buyers ask us.
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 all state and local government web content — including meeting video, new and archived — to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
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.
Do our archived meeting videos need to be accessible too?
Yes. The rule covers existing content, not just new recordings — years of archived meetings carry the same obligations. Aware Lens bulk-imports full backlogs and processes them automatically, so you catch up instead of starting over.
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 optional add-on that extends Ask Aware to the largest corpus of local-government meeting records ever assembled — 3,800+ U.S. towns and cities, plus Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Councils use it to see how peers handled the same question, with every answer cited to the official record.
How fast can our town 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. Towns 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. An Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR/VPAT) documents it formally, and every correction is logged in a defensible audit trail.
See your own meetings through the lens.
A 30-minute demo with your town’s actual video — the summary, the answers and the compliance report, live, before you sign anything. Then be conformant within days, with 252 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