Apr 18

Could better accessibility options help local governments choose video?

by Justin Mosebach Add Comment (2)

Let’s think about public meetings for a bit. Several groups of people have an even harder time than the rest of us at attending public meetings.

Most of us just have excuses of a busy life, apathy, etc.

But some people don’t. Consider the following:

Other Languages

I blogged about the influx of Hispanics and Latinos into the U.S. last week (see: How Can Social Media Help Governments Serve the Booming Hispanic Population?).

So, how can Spanish-only-speaking Americans understand what is happening at a local government meeting? They only have a few options:

• The local government can provide a translator.
• The citizen can bring someone along to the meeting to translate for them.
• If the meeting is recorded on video, closed captioning can be added and they can watch the meeting later.
• Or they can watch it immediately if the translation is done live on the TV.

Disabled citizens

Let’s say that you’re hearing-impaired. You want to be informed about your local government, but you don’t have time to make meetings. The meetings aren’t on video and aren’t closed-captioned.

Or, let’s say that you’re unable to attend public meetings due to a disability that doesn’t allow for you to travel easily. At the same time, there are issues that your local government is dealing with that affect you and you want to be actively involved.

Some ideas

What if public meetings were on video and online? But wait. What if they also had closed captioning in English? What if there was also a transcript that was easily made available by a vendor for the local government? Government officials (and citizens) could easily research past meetings to see what happened. And for areas that have a high population of non-English speaking citizens, what if the closed captioning was also available in Spanish so that someone could watch a translation of the meeting online?

What if local Clerks didn’t have to deal with most of this because much of it would be done by someone else – saving Clerks time?

What do you think?

Would more local governments be interested in posting video of their public meetings online if:

• they could be done in closed captioning by a vendor?
• the closed captioning was also done in another language?
• there was a transcription made available by the vendor so that government officials (and citizens) could easily search a word-for-word record of what happened in past meetings?

I’m not saying that our company does all of this.

But — what if we did? Would it serve your community well?

Let us know in the comments below… I look forward to your thoughts!

Miscellaneous, Open Government

accessibility, citizen participation, county commissioners, county government, engagement, Hispanics, local government, Minorities, online video stats, open government, open meetings, video