This article is general information, not legal advice. Check with your city attorney or county counsel about how these rules apply to your agency.
County residents often live far from the county seat, speak many languages and follow board meetings online rather than in person. For clerks of the board, board of supervisors meeting translation and live captions are practical ways to reach them, and 2026 and 2027 bring rules that make planning worthwhile now.
What changes for county boards
SB 707
SB 707 (Durazo), the Brown Act modernization bill, was signed October 3, 2025. Most of its new requirements for "eligible legislative bodies" start July 1, 2026. Eligible bodies include boards of supervisors of counties over 30,000, along with city councils of cities with 30,000 or more residents or in counties of 600,000 or more. Confirm with county counsel whether your board is covered.
For eligible bodies, SB 707 includes:
- A two-way telephonic or two-way audiovisual option for the public to attend and comment remotely.
- Agenda translation (not the full packet) into "applicable languages" based on American Community Survey data on residents who speak English less than "very well," up to three languages, posted with the English agenda and including instructions in each language for joining by phone or internet. Digital translation tools are allowed.
- A duty to "reasonably assist" members of the public who want to translate a meeting or receive interpretation, as long as it doesn't disrupt the meeting. Boards aren't required to provide interpretation themselves.
- Reasonable efforts to reach communities that don't traditionally participate.
- A public meetings webpage linked from the home page, and a way to request agendas electronically.
- A policy for technology disruptions to remote participation.
SB 707 does not itself require live captions. Captions and live translation are a practical way to support its language-access and participation goals.
ADA Title II web rule
The DOJ's April 2024 rule requires state and local government web content and mobile apps to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. In April 2026, DOJ extended the compliance dates by one year: April 26, 2027 for public entities with a population of 50,000 or more, and April 26, 2028 for smaller entities and special districts. The extension doesn't change the standard, and the ADA's general obligations still apply.
WCAG 2.1 includes Success Criterion 1.2.4, Captions (Live), Level AA, covering live audio in synchronized media, and 1.2.2, Captions (Prerecorded), Level A, which covers posted meeting recordings. The rule has exceptions, including for certain archived content, so check with county counsel about how it applies to your streams and archive.
Board of supervisors meeting translation: how it works
- Connect your encoder. Add SentraCaptions as one more destination on the encoder you already stream with, such as Pearl, OBS or vMix, over RTMP or SRT. No new hardware.
- Choose languages. English captions plus translation into up to eight languages per meeting, from a list of 75 that includes Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Korean, Armenian, Punjabi, Hindi and many more.
- Show captions in the chamber. The chamber screen shows captions full screen, one or more languages side by side, with the meeting title, a clock and a QR code.
- Reach remote residents. Residents scan the QR code or open the link and read along in their language at their own text size. No app and no sign-in, which matters for residents in outlying areas watching from home.
- Send one language to YouTube. If you stream to YouTube Live, captions in one language can go to the stream. Translations stay on the chamber screen and phone page.
Captions appear about one second after speech, and the sentence in progress updates live. Speech recognition is English, with Spanish speakers at public comment recognized too.
Running several rooms on a county schedule
Counties often run the board, planning commission and other bodies in different rooms, sometimes on the same day. Several rooms or meetings can run at once, each with its own screen and link. A few tips:
- Name each meeting clearly so the right title appears on each chamber screen.
- Keep a shared glossary of supervisor names, district names, unincorporated communities, roads and county programs so captions spell them right.
- Pause captions for recess and closed session. While paused, nothing is captioned, translated, stored or billed, and screens show "Paused."
- Ask a fluent speaker to review the languages that matter most; translation quality varies by language.
Working with CivicCA
If your board uses CivicCA for agendas, meetings and minutes, captioning starts when the meeting starts and pauses for recess and closed session. Captions show on the CivicCA dais display, the public portal and residents' phones, and transcripts and subtitle files can go with the meeting video.
After the meeting, and what to plan for
Transcripts are available in every language as TXT or SRT files. Staff can use them to help prepare minutes, though transcripts are not official minutes. SRT files can be posted with archived video as subtitles.
Every screen labels captions as automatic and says they may contain errors. When a deaf or hard-of-hearing resident requests CART, a human stenographer captioning live, as an accommodation, consider it; automatic captions don't replace CART in every situation.
Pricing is quoted based on hours of meetings and number of languages, with no per-viewer fees and no hardware. Paused time isn't used.