Developing Accessibility in the Parliamentary Reporting Office of the Dutch House of Representatives

Introduction to accessibility

The Parliamentary Reporting Office of the Dutch parliament celebrated its 175th anniversary on 24 September 2024. Since 1849, reports have been made of the plenary meetings with the higher purpose of making transparent to citizens what has been discussed by their representatives. The democratic process in optima forma.

Not all citizens have equal interest or stake in the parliamentary process. Some people work in jobs that force them to deal with legislation on a daily basis. Usually, they can easily find their way to the written information that our office provides. But many others live their lives without needing reports from the parliament. Nevertheless, from a democratic point of view, it must always be possible for them to gain access to information that concerns them. Legislation on health issues, student financing, infrastructure and social security, for example, affects society as a whole.

Debates in the Dutch parliament are made transparent through the parliamentary reports, but are these reports usable for everyone? My conclusion is: no, unfortunately not. The topics that are discussed in parliament can have broad consequences for Dutch citizens. However, because they are discussed at a detailed and specialist level, using memoranda and legislative proposals that are often formulated in legal terms, it is difficult for the average citizen to make sense of them.

Accessibility evolution

The world has changed remarkably in the last two decades. For a very long time, citizens were dependent on newspapers and news broadcasts to find out what was discussed in parliament that day. Parliamentary reports were used by journalists, lawyers, civil servants and students. However, in the last 20 years, there has been a shift in the way citizens obtain information. They want to request and process information through their preferred format, at a time that suits them. The Dutch parliament and in particular the Parliamentary Reporting Office recognised this development and have made debates accessible in ways other than reports: via Debate Direct, short web reports, live subtitling and sign language interpreters.

On the Debate Direct platform, active since 2010, people can watch live broadcasts of debate or rewatch archived videos of debates with metadata about topics and speakers. Debate Direct contains alert, search and review functions, which have further increased the accessibility of the debates. At the end of 2024, Debate Direct added images to the agenda, improving its visual design.

Since 2013, an alternative to the regular report has been made available: the short web report. These reports, which are approximately one page in length, provide an objective representation of what was discussed in the debates, written at an accessible language level.

Live subtitling was introduced in 2018: debates that are topical and are expected to be followed by many people are subtitled live. Most other debates are subtitled afterwards based on reports prepared by the Parliamentary Reporting Office. These reports are therefore used twice: as a report and as subtitling.

In 2020, sign language interpreters were hired for the first time to interpret debates. Interpreters are deployed for debates that are expected to attract a lot of interest. All these individual steps have been taken to make a more accessible parliament.

Accessibility challenges

After all this, has everything been done to make parliamentary debates accessible to all citizens in the Netherlands? I am firmly convinced that this is still not the case and that the focus at the next stage should be on making the text that is spoken in parliament understandable. First, some background information. The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) uses six language levels to indicate the language proficiency of individuals, from A1 to C2. In the Netherlands, 67.9% of the population has a command of Dutch at A1, A2 or B1 level. However, our analysis of parliamentary texts suggests that the language level of parliamentarians is at B2 level, and more often at C1 or even C2 level. This means that only 32% of the Dutch population fully understands the spoken text in debates and 68% of the population has difficulty understanding or does not understand what is said in parliament at all.

How can debates be made more understandable when the language level is so high? The Parliamentary Reporting Office has tried to improve accessibility on precisely that point through projects and pilots. One project involved making a short version of the video of a debate, with a voice-over explaining in easy language what was said. Reducing an entire debate of up to six hours in length to a four-minute video makes it impossible to give a good representation of what was said. As a result, the short videos take on more of a teaser form, an announcement that a debate has taken place. For more information, reference is made to the debate itself or to the website of the House of Representatives.

In another project, a podcast was made by parliamentary reporters on matters that were discussed in a debate. They used quotations from the debate and explained, in easy language, the essence of the debate. Both projects were promising but labour-intensive. For reasons of capacity, neither project has made significant progress.

Generative AI for improving accessibility

In the search for ways to make difficult text simple, the development of generative AI has been an advantage. Free apps became available that convert difficult text into simple text. The next step could be to provide the reports of parliamentary debates with buttons that convert the selected text into simple or even very simple text. Unfortunately, there are obstacles in applying AI techniques.

The first obstacle in using generative AI is system security. Introducing external applications risks introducing viruses into the closed network of the parliament. Obtaining budgets is also a challenge. Accessibility at the language level has yet to reach the threshold to justify increased expenditure.

Another obstacle to simplifying difficult language comes from the parliamentary communications office. This office is hesitant to become too involved in interpretation of politics. Its reasoning is that if politicians want to be better understood, they should put energy into that themselves; it is not the task of the civil service to provide that support.

Lastly, capacity is always a problem when developing new initiatives. To make the language level of debates accessible to more citizens requires investment and commitment in addition to existing and already taxing operational work.

Conclusion

We remain hopeful that steps can be taken to expand accessibility. According to research conducted among people who have seen examples of the short video reports, 67% indicate that short videos of debate add value for them (DirectResearch, 2023). About half indicated that they would share the video on social media or discuss it with others and 53% indicated that the video was a reason for them to look up more information about the debate.

The obvious conclusion is that offering debates at an accessible language level will ensure that people become better informed about the topics that affect them. In turn, that touches on the goal mentioned earlier in this article: to make the work of representatives transparent to citizens; the democratic process in optima forma.

Anneke Faaij-Nulle is the team leader of application management and support with the Parliamentary Reporting Office of the House of Representatives, The Netherlands.

Reference

DirectResearch (2023). Rapportage: Tweede Kamer der Staten Generaal Concepttest debatvideo’s.