Town planning: portable captioning, scribing and school coordination for accessible town meetings

Townsend’s Commission on Disability spent a large portion of its Sept. 24 meeting detailing what the town must do to make public meetings accessible — and how to split responsibility between the town, TCAM (the PEG/municipal access entity) and the regional schools.

Commission members said the town will move many meetings to the regional high school because it offers more reliable public Wi‑Fi and technical capacity. Speakers described portable “scribing” systems (near‑real‑time transcription), assistive listening receivers for people with hearing aids, individual microphones for meeting tables and registration/webinar workflows for attendees with access needs. "That's a thing that I think probably TCAM is gonna look into investing in because that will be something that we're gonna have to be compliant to," one local access representative said during the discussion.

Members agreed to invite the superintendent and school technical staff to a future meeting, create a short prioritized list of “must‑have” items (portable devices that can move between town facilities and the high school auditoriums) and to explore grant funding and creative partnerships for purchases.