Brattleboro Community TV (BCTV), the public access media center serving almost a dozen towns in southern Windham County, Vt., has successfully implemented MediaScribe, an AI-powered captioning and transcription solution that helps cities meet WCAG 2.1 AA and ADA standards for government meetings across all delivery channels to enhance in-room accessibility for their board meeting coverage.
After evaluating multiple options, Johnny Gifford, executive director of the Public, Education, and Government (PEG) station, landed on the MediaScribe solution, noting that other systems felt too cobbled together or too expensive. “MediaScribe hit the sweet spot: purpose-built, easy to implement, and ready for real-world use,” he added.
“We had everything up and running in less than a day,” recalled Van Wile, content manager and primary operator of MedaScribe at BCTV. “We were able to test it out at the next board meeting and it worked great. We’ve gotten positive feedback from not just the board, but from people in the audience.”
When fiscal constraints made ongoing ASL interpretation unsustainable for Brattleboro’s bimonthly Selectboard meetings, town officials turned to BCTV to find a scalable solution that fit within new budget realities. MediaScribe’s straightforward setup and simplified workflow allowed BCTV staff to easily integrate real-time captions into both in-room displays and mobile devices without technical headaches.
“Brattleboro has always been pretty proactive with providing accessibility in a variety of ways,” Gifford said. “MediaScribe was exactly the service we needed—it’s user-friendly, accurate, and actually digestible for a small PEG facility like ours. It gave us a way to continue expanding access, even with limited resources.”
MediaScribe combines a hardware interface with cloud-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology to cost-effectively create speech-to-text transcriptions for real-time open captions, closed captions, mobile captions, and translations. (Attendees can access the captions on their personal mobile devices using a QR code.) Its SDI outputs make it easy to integrate with existing AV and broadcast infrastructure, enabling captions to appear on both in-room displays and live or recorded streams. Non-technical staff can operate the system via a simple user interface and presets, while a custom vocabulary feature increases accuracy by allowing users to add the names of local public figures and locales, such as “Brattleboro,” which other transcription systems have struggled to recognize.
According to Wile, MediaScribe receives the meeting feed via SDI and sends real-time captions to the room display through an HDMI conversion. “The fact that it’s SDI native was huge for us,” Wile said. “It dropped right into our control room without major rewiring.”
The in-room captions have benefitted all meeting attendees, not just those with hearing loss, especially when agenda items require financial talk. “During budget discussions, it was so helpful to have the numbers show up and stay on screen. It improved clarity for everyone in the room—not just for accessibility,” Wile explained.
BCTV keeps operations simple by using a single preset tailored to the Selectboard meetings, but it intends to scale MediaScribe for broader use across departments.
For example, while in-room captions were the priority, BCTV is also considering MediaScribe for closed captions for its cable broadcasts, which are available on two channels on Comcast Cable. Plus, the station is planning to start exporting transcripts for use by municipal clerks. “Our admin now uses the transcript file to prep minutes before the video even posts,” Gifford added. “That’s a huge time saver.”
Beyond compliance, BCTV sees MediaScribe as a tool for inclusive civic engagement. The station is already exploring mobile translation features to support Brattleboro’s immigrant community, and intends to expand captioning to additional meetings and remote events, such as large town hall gatherings.
“We have a pretty decent-sized immigrant population,” Gifford said. “If there’s an issue that comes up where you might have a large audience of non-English speakers at the meeting, I want to make sure that we’re ready to provide accessible options for them.”