Helping Everyone Hear What Matters: How Dutch Municipalities Made Council Meetings Accessible

In municipalities across the Netherlands, local council meetings are where important decisions happen. Elected officials gather to debate and vote on issues that affect everyday life for residents, from parks and schools to roads and public services. For citizens, being able to follow these discussions isn’t just about staying informed. It’s also about participating in the decisions that shape their communities.

Many Dutch municipalities use Company Webcast, part of Euronext and a leading webcasting provider in the Netherlands, to put their meetings online. About 120 Dutch municipalities use Company Webcast’s services to make their council meetings available to the public. But a significant portion of citizens couldn’t fully benefit from these recordings.

Challenge

For people who are deaf or hard of hearing, which is about 10-15% of European Uinion citizens, following these important municipal meetings was difficult or impossible. Company Webcast was using Google’s automatic subtitles, but the quality just wasn’t good enough.

The subtitles often got political terms wrong, mixed up the names of political parties, and misunderstood laws being discussed. This created a real barrier for people with hearing problems who wanted to know what was happening in their municipalities.

Making matters more urgent, in October 2016, the European Union passed a law called “Digital accessibility” (Directive EU 2016/2102). This law requires all public organizations in EU countries to make their websites and apps accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities.

Dutch municipalities now faced two challenges: they needed to help all citizens participate, and they had to follow this new law. They needed a solution that would:

1. Create subtitles accurate enough for people with hearing loss to understand municipal meetings
2. Not cost too much for municipalities with tight budgets
3. Meet the new EU accessibility requirements

Solution

To solve this problem, Amberscript teamed up with Company Webcast. This partnership allowed Amberscript to offer its subtitle technology to municipalities through Company Webcast’s existing platform. Municipalities could keep working with Company Webcast while getting much better subtitles.

Some municipalities, like Enschede, started using Amberscript’s automatic speech recognition technology to create subtitles. This was already much better than the Google subtitles they had before. To make the quality of automatically generated subtitles better, Amberscript used the Dictionary feature, available on the platform. The feature allows to add words and phrases commonly used in municipal meetings. Using this list, the technology was then trained to recognize political terms that regular speech recognition technology usually suffers with.

Other municipalities, like Barneveld, chose Amberscript’s “human-made” subtitling service, which combines automatic speech recognition with quality checks done by professional subtitlers. This solution delivers an even better quality, which is important for council meetings.

Patrick van der Geest, CEO of Company Webcast, commented:

Results

The specialized subtitles made a real difference. People with hearing loss, like Jaco, can now follow municipal meetings and understand what decisions were being made in their communities.

The special training for political terms was key to making this work. By focusing on the unique words used in municipal meetings, the system got much better at understanding and transcribing these specialized discussions.

The technical setup was smooth because it worked with systems that municipalities were already using, so they didn’t have to change their entire process or learn new technology.

Looking for a subtitling solution to make your content accessible? Get in touch with Amberscript to see how we can support your next project.