This article is general information, not legal advice. Check with your city attorney or county counsel about how these rules apply to your agency.
SB 707 asks many California legislative bodies to let the public attend and comment remotely. This article summarizes what the bill says about remote participation and explains where live captions and translation can help the people joining from home.
What SB 707 says about remote participation
SB 707 (Durazo), the Brown Act modernization bill, was signed on October 3, 2025. Most of its new requirements for "eligible legislative bodies" start 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 your body is covered is a question to confirm with your city attorney or county counsel.
For eligible bodies, the bill includes several requirements related to remote participation:
- A remote option for the public. Eligible bodies must offer a two-way telephonic or two-way audiovisual way for the public to attend and comment remotely.
- A policy for technology disruptions. Bodies must adopt a policy for disruptions to remote participation. It includes a recess of up to one hour and a good-faith effort to restore access, and the body may continue after a roll-call finding.
- Instructions in other languages. Translated agendas must include instructions, in that language, for joining by phone or internet.
- Help with translation. Bodies must "reasonably assist" members of the public who want to translate a meeting or receive interpretation, as long as it doesn't disrupt the meeting. They are not required to provide interpretation themselves.
SB 707 also extends the AB 2449 member teleconference ("just cause") rules to January 1, 2030. That provision concerns members of the body, not the public.
This is a summary, not legal advice. Check with your city attorney or county counsel on how these provisions apply to your agency.
Where captions fit
SB 707 does not itself require live captions. But captions and live translation are a practical way to support the bill's language-access and participation goals, and they are especially useful for people taking part remotely.
Remote participants often follow along on a phone or laptop, sometimes in a noisy home or with poor speakers. Captions help them keep up with the discussion so they know when their item is coming up and what has been said before they comment.
How it works for people at home
A phone page in their language
Residents scan the QR code, or open the link you share, and read along in their language at their own text size. No app, no sign-in. Captions appear about one second after speech, and the sentence in progress updates live. You can include the link with your remote participation instructions and on your public meetings webpage.
Live translation
Each meeting can be translated into up to 8 languages chosen from the 75 SentraCaptions supports. Many agencies will look first at the "applicable languages" they identify for agenda translation, but you can choose what fits your community. See Choosing translation languages for your meetings.
Captions on the stream
If your remote viewers watch on YouTube Live, captions in one language can be sent to the YouTube Live stream. YouTube shows one caption language per stream, so translations are on the chamber screen and phone page.
Captioning remote comments, too
When a resident calls in or speaks over video, their comment is part of the meeting audio. If that audio is mixed into the stream your encoder sends, it is captioned and translated like anyone speaking in the chamber. That helps people in the room and at home follow remote comments.
Audio quality from callers varies. Mixing remote audio at a level close to the room microphones helps. See Chamber audio tips for better captions.
When remote access is disrupted
Your technology disruption policy is your agency's decision. If the body takes a recess while remote access is restored, staff can pause captions. While paused, nothing is captioned, translated, stored or billed, and the screens show "Paused", so residents on the phone page know the meeting is on hold rather than wondering if something broke.
If your agency uses CivicCA, captioning starts when the meeting starts and pauses for recess and closed session, and captions show on the CivicCA dais display, public portal and residents' phones.
A note on accommodation requests
Automatic captions are labeled as automatic on every screen and may contain errors. They are a useful everyday tool, but they don't replace CART in every situation. If a deaf resident requests CART as an accommodation, your agency should consider that request. See Automatic captions and CART: when each makes sense.