South Lanarkshire Council Find Subtitling Streamed Meetings too Expensive

South Lanarkshire Council's plan to provide subtitling service for live-streamed on hold due to cost.

08:01 22 November 2021

South Lanarkshire Council has been live-streaming their meetings since last year in their efforts to make council business more accessible during the pandemic. 

 

Councillors have been considering professional subtitling services to make the recordings of meetings accessible to deaf people. However, the service proves to be too costly. 

 

Based on costs to date, a full year cost could be up to £100,000, which does not include the significant level of employee time taken to check the work before uploading. 

 

Councillors are now waiting for an update on the matter at a meeting of the finance and corporate committees. 

 

Currently, there are no local authorities in Scotland that make recordings of meetings accessible to deaf people. Thus, it is hoped that South Lanarkshire Council would lead other local authorities in the region by offering this service. 

 

However, it was noted that there is currently no legal requirement to subtitle live-streamed meetings. The automatic subtitles, like those available on video-sharing platforms, work well for other authorities and this, together with the formal minutes of meetings, provides a good sense of the meeting content.