Captions on.
Speech-to-text runs on the chair's laptop by default. The TV always shows what was just said.
Product / Accessibility
Deaf-first by default.
Captions on. Voice never required. ASL gloss in the minutes. WCAG 2.2 AA, audited.
The defaults
Settings the chair never has to change.
Motion text visible.
The current motion stays on the TV the entire time it's pending. Nobody has to remember what they're voting on.
Thumb-sized buttons.
Vote controls are at least 44×44px on phone. Reachable one-handed, with or without dexterity.
No audio-only cues.
Every alert is also visual. The gavel is a flash and a haptic, not a sound.
High-contrast type.
Order Navy on Paper, 12.6:1. Larger ratios anywhere small text appears.
Reduced motion.
Respects prefers-reduced-motion. The gavel strike collapses to an instant cut.
Captions from the room.
Two mics, one at the podium and one at the interpreter desk, feed live captions to the TV. Deaf members read the room without lip-reading. Hearing parents read the interpreter's voicing without straining to hear.
Live captions
How the captions actually work.
Two dedicated mic stations beat one room mic. One iPad at the podium, one at the interpreter desk. Each station streams its own audio, so the system already knows who is speaking. Word accuracy goes up and the overlap math goes away.
The TV shows the speaker's name when the station is paired to a member. When a member declines recording, their lines show as "[member declined recording]" and stay out of the public minutes.
Executive session is one tap on the officer console. The mic pauses, the RECORDING indicator clears from every screen, and nothing said during the pause is captured or transcribed.
The captions feed a draft transcript. The secretary edits it before publish. Approved minutes are still the legal record, written by a person, signed off by the board.
We do not auto-caption ASL. ASL is its own language and live ASL recognition is a research problem, not a product feature. We caption English speech from the mics. The interpreter's voicing of an ASL signer is captured the same way any other speaker is.
ASL in the record
An ASL gloss field on every motion.
For Deaf clubs and Deaf-Plus orgs that conduct business in ASL, the secretary can record an ASL gloss alongside the English text. Both go in the minutes. Neither is paraphrased.
Interpreter mode
Pin the interpreter on the TV.
Two-up layout: the meeting on the left, the interpreter video on the right. Both sized for room visibility. The interpreter window stays the same size whether they're signing or not.
Plain language
Reading level flagged before publish.
The secretary sees a reading-level indicator on the draft. Anything above grade 8 gets a soft warning. Plain language is a default, not a checkbox.
WCAG 2.2 AA
Audited, with the receipts.
The marketing site and the product are both designed against WCAG 2.2 AA. axe-core runs on every page in CI. Our public conformance statement lives at /accessibility-statement/.
What we won't do
Two firm "no"s.
- No auto-captions for ASL. ASL is its own language, not subtitled English.
- No paraphrasing in the minutes. The record is what was said, not a summary.