A move to provide an automated subtitling service for live streamed council meetings is proving too costly.
Since the turn of the year South Lanarkshire Council (SLC) meetings have been broadcast to the public after councillors agreed last December to make council business more accessible during the pandemic.
However councillors have since raised concerns that the deaf community could be excluded with the absence of subtitles.
Councillors are to be updated on the matter at a meeting of the finance and corporate committee on Wednesday, November 10.
It is understood that the option to professionally subtitle meetings is causing delays in the process of uploading the subtitled version of meetings and is proving costly.
Based on costs to date, a full year cost will be in the range of £80,000 to £100,000, but this figure does not include the significant level of employee time taken to check the work before uploading.
It was hoped that SLC would lead the way as no other local authority in Scotland currently makes recordings of meetings accessible to deaf people over and above automated subtitling.
However it was noted that there is currently no legal requirement to subtitle live streamed meetings.
The automatic subtitles, available via the YouTube platform, works well for other authorities and this, together with the formal minutes of meetings, provides a good sense of the meeting content.
Officers view this as a good option, improving on the speed of information being available.
SLC initially were unable to live stream meetings and instead recorded meetings which were then subtitled by an external provider of subtitle services before uploading to YouTube.
The council has since rolled out live streaming of meetings and all council, committee and forum meetings are now live streamed.
Earlier plans to immediately publish recorded meetings without subtitles or a BSL interpreter were dismissed by councillors as “a u-turn on equalities and inclusion”.
The council is in the process of procuring an upgrade to the Audio-Visual system in the council chamber and installing the system in Committee Room 1 with the aim of improving the overall live stream viewer experience.
The timescale for completion is the end of February 2022.
Councillors have expressed the desire for live captioning during live streams, however no reliable solution has been developed. Viewers can access the subtitles the next day.
Links to the Agenda Papers will be added to the YouTube front screen of the recording to improve accessibility and address any issues with the captioning. YouTube subtitling is available at no cost.
Meanwhile, to ensure equal access to information, in future any members’ awareness seminar will also include a BSL signer as part of the recording.
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