Nelonen required to further improve the quality of its subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

Providing subtitles for television programmes in Finnish and Swedish is important to enable those with impaired hearing to follow the programmes. Subtitles are useful for other viewers as well, including older people and those learning the language. Subtitles must be provided in the original language of the programme: in Finnish for Finnish-language programmes and in Swedish for Swedish-language programmes. The quality of subtitling services must be high enough to ensure that subtitles are sufficiently clear and easy to understand. The obligation to provide subtitles applies to the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle) and the channels MTV3 and Nelonen.

Traficom monitors the quality of subtitling and requires operators to address insufficient quality

In the spring of 2022, the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency Traficom reprimanded Sanoma Media Finland Ltd for its failure to meet the quality requirements concerning the obligation to provide subtitling services on the television channel Nelonen. According to Traficom, the subtitling service on Nelonen did not meet the statutory requirements of being sufficiently clear and easy to understand. In response to Traficom’s decision, Sanoma Media Finland Ltd introduced a more sophisticated version of its AI-based subtitling software. In the autumn of 2022, Traficom noted that based on its preliminary assessment the quality of subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing produced with the new application version used by Sanoma Media Finland Ltd was much higher than before and decided to undertake a new detailed quality assessment. 

Based on the new assessment, however, Traficom concluded that, overall, the subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing provided on the channel Nelonen still fail to meet the quality requirement of sufficient clarity and ease of understanding. They often fail to correspond to programme content, and the speech and dialogue included in the programme have not been summarised or clarified to ensure that the subtitles are comprehensible. Moreover, the subtitles still include plenty of mistakes, such as incorrectly recognised or misspelled words. Perhaps the most severe shortcoming is that the lines displayed on the screen do not indicate the speaker in any way or include punctuation (e.g. full stops or question marks).

Traficom reprimands Nelonen again – quality issues must be addressed by 1 August 2023

Traficom has again reprimanded Sanoma Media Finland Ltd for its failure to meet the quality requirements concerning the obligation to provide subtitling services. In its decision, Traficom requires Sanoma Media Finland Ltd to ensure that, when considered as a whole, its subtitling service on the channel Nelonen is of high quality, meaning that subtitles are sufficiently clear and easy to understand for the viewer. 

Traficom’s decision specifies the measures Sanoma Media Finland Ltd must take to meet the quality requirements concerning the obligation to provide subtitling services. If the measures included in the decision are currently unfeasible with AI-based subtitling software, human resources must be used to manually supplement or revise the subtitles produced with AI.
The purpose of the quality requirements for subtitling for the deaf and hard of hearing and the corrective action required in the decision is to enable those with impaired hearing to watch programmes on Nelonen and thereby promote the equality of people with disabilities and their equal access to participate in society. High-quality subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing enable viewers to follow programmes completely without sound.