Council and board meetings get most of the attention, but many decisions residents care about start at the planning commission or in committee. Here is how to bring live captions and translation to those meetings too.
Why commissions and committees matter
A resident worried about a new development next door will often have the most say at the planning commission hearing, not at council. Budget questions get worked out in finance committees. Parks, transportation and housing advisory bodies shape what eventually lands on the council agenda.
If captions and translation are only available at council, residents who rely on them miss the earlier, often more open, part of the conversation. Captioning these meetings is a practical way to support language access and participation across your whole public process.
What the rules say, and don't
SB 707, the Brown Act modernization bill signed October 3, 2025, sets most of its new requirements for "eligible legislative bodies" starting July 1, 2026. Eligible bodies include city councils of cities with 30,000 or more residents (or cities in counties of 600,000 or more) and boards of supervisors of counties over 30,000. Whether a given commission or committee is covered is a question to confirm with your city attorney or county counsel.
SB 707 does not itself require live captions. It does ask eligible bodies to translate agendas into applicable languages, to reasonably assist members of the public who want to translate a meeting or receive interpretation, and to make reasonable efforts to reach communities that don't traditionally participate. Captions and live translation support those goals wherever you use them.
Separately, the DOJ's ADA Title II web rule requires state and local government web content and mobile apps to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA, which includes success criterion 1.2.4, Captions (Live). The compliance dates are April 26, 2027 for public entities with a population of 50,000 or more and April 26, 2028 for smaller entities and special districts. If your commission meetings are streamed on your website, ask counsel how the rule applies to them.
What makes these meetings different
Commissions and committees often run differently from council, and that affects setup:
- Different rooms. Some meet in the main chamber, others in a conference room or community center.
- Overlapping schedules. Two bodies may meet at the same time.
- Shorter or irregular meetings. Some committees meet monthly or only as needed.
- Specialized vocabulary. Planning items are full of street names, project names and zoning terms.
How SentraCaptions handles them
Several rooms at once
Several rooms or meetings can run at the same time, each with its own chamber screen and its own link. A planning commission in the chamber and a committee in a conference room can both be captioned without sharing a screen.
Use the encoder you already have
If the room already streams, SentraCaptions is one more destination on the encoder you use, such as Pearl, OBS, vMix and others, over RTMP or SRT. No new hardware.
Languages per meeting
You choose translation languages for each meeting, up to 8 per meeting from 75 supported languages. A planning item in a neighborhood with many Punjabi or Armenian speakers can have those languages turned on for that hearing. Hmong and Khmer are not supported. See choosing translation languages.
Screens and phones
The chamber screen shows captions full screen with one or more languages side by side, the meeting title, a clock and a QR code. Residents scan the code and read along on their phones in their language at their own text size, with no app and no sign-in. That works well in smaller rooms without a large display, too.
A glossary that grows with you
Add commissioners, staff planners, project names and street names to your glossary so captions spell them right. See building a caption glossary.
Keeping costs predictable
Adding more bodies raises a fair question about cost. SentraCaptions has no per-viewer fees and no hardware to buy. You can buy minutes as you need them or prepay, and paused time isn't used, so a recess or closed session doesn't count. Quotes are based on hours of meetings and number of languages, which makes it easy to estimate what adding a commission or two would look like. See budgeting for live captions.
A simple rollout plan
- Start with the planning commission, since its hearings often draw residents directly affected by decisions.
- Add committees that meet in rooms that already stream.
- Set up a chamber screen or post the QR code in each room.
- Update the glossary with each body's members and common terms.
- Announce it on each agenda and on your public meetings webpage, noting that captions are automatic and may contain errors, and how to request accommodations such as CART.