Unceasing Echoes

I’m going to go into more detail here, partly to serve my need to let it all out because of the pent-up stress, and partly to let anyone who reads it have a glimpse into something of what it is like for blind people using access technology, how a visually impaired person’s engagement in a meeting is different from a sighted person’s.   I’m sure that younger visually impaired people who have grown up with fast-moving technological progress may find all the below much more manageable than me, which is fantastic. I’m in my late 50s and while relatively technically skilled, I am not as fast as some, especially while I’m trying to also think and participate in complex discussions.   In the three previous posts, I’ve described the context of video meetings, that software/app updates can have an impact on accessibility and how screen reader users hear all the information audibly through a single earphone (rather than taking some in aurally and some visually).   Here I want to show how hard vi

While each of the many video conferencing platforms (MS Teams, Zoom, Jitsi Meet, Skype, Google Meets, WebEx…) is similar and has broadly the same functions/controls, they are all in different places, orders and with different spacing. For example, on the Microsoft Teams iOS app, the buttons are mainly at the bottom of the screen where on Zoom, they are at the top. A software update can change the number, position, order and spacing of the on-screen buttons. It can also  introduce new functions that were previously on menus, sometimes these have been well implemented for accessibility (they speak their function), other times they have not been properly labelled and might just say ‘button’ and nothing more, or no longer work  consistently.   Blind people use either keyboard commands (on a laptop), or finger gestures (on a smartphone or tablet) to move around the screen, but all this information about button positions needs to be memorised for those who play an active role in busy meeting

While the range of platforms that I use in my work has settled down somewhat now  to mainly Microsoft Teams, with a few meetings on Zoom, Skype, Google Meets and WebEx, in the free market competitive arena, the platforms are all continually being ‘developed’/’improved’ with regular updates. I use  the quote marks because, without the designers paying conscious attention to screen reader accessibility, developments and improvements for sighted people often result in a reduction in the accessibility (and therefore the usability) by blind people. In  practice, this can mean that an onscreen function (like ‘raise hand’ that worked perfectly well, undergoes an ‘improvement’ without any  thought of maintaining its previous accessibility and stops working.   The only audio information that sighted people need is to hear the other people’s voices on the call, everything else is taken from what they see on the screen and most won’t need to even notice the extent of this: -who’s on the call, who

Since starting to work from home in mid-March, I have spent what has felt like the majority  of my working time on video calls of one kind or another. They have ranged from one-to-one phone calls (but with video), through the most common three or four to fifteen people, to much larger meetings. I’ve talked here previously about some of the more general dynamics and impacts of video meetings for me – for example the fact of being on constant close-up view, and yet not able to see the other participants, how exhausting it is etc. This and the next couple of posts, will be my attempt to explain what it is like in practical terms being in a video meeting using a screen reader.   I am going to be deliberately very detailed, because with accessibility issues, the devil is absolutely in the detail. The detail is what offers the possibility for solutions and  improvement, it is the thing that software/app designers need to hear as feedback about inadequacies in the accessibility of their platf