Civic trust grows when residents can access information, understand what government is doing, and verify that their voices matter. Accessibility—captions, translations, ASL, readable documents, and inclusive web experiences—is the hinge on which each of those outcomes turns. When access is routine, accurate, and timely, residents interpret government as competent and fair; when access breaks, the same residents infer indifference, exclusion, or even hostility.

This white paper argues that trust is observable. It emerges from concrete, resident‑visible artifacts—stable live streams with low-latency captions, translated agendas linked from a canonical page, corrections notes posted the same day, and complete archives that are easy to find. We show how to convert ethical and legal requirements into service levels (e.g., caption latency ≤ 2.0 s for marquee meetings), assign named owners, and collect evidence (snapshots, logs, link audits) that the public can inspect.

We synthesize research on participation, disability inclusion, and digital service quality to present a practical model for clerks and small IT teams. The model centers on four pillars: Accessibility as SLOs, Publication Integrity, Transparent Corrections, and Resident‑Facing Measurement. Tables and checklists map each pillar to actions at the console, clauses in procurements, and artifacts on the meeting page. A two‑year roadmap illustrates how municipalities can raise trust even under flat funding by reducing variance and publishing proof of performance.

The paper closes with a research and evaluation agenda. It recommends monthly scorecards that combine accessibility metrics with engagement signals (multilingual questions per meeting, sentiment in comments) and protocols for community review of glossaries and translations.