Video meetings: glimpses into the barriers 2

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’s speaking, who’s got their hand up to speak

-all the controls - to mute the microphone/video, to raise/lower  the hand, end the call, share screen, enter a menu, choose audio option etc.

-the ‘chat’ function – the concurrent text based dialogue and information sharing that goes alongside a call.

 

For visually impaired people using a screen reader, everything is gained from audio information - the voices in the meeting and the screen reader’s electronic voice reading out everything in the list above. It all comes through the same audio channel (and through a single earphone).

 

I am continually adjusting my methods for managing my work and have found that the most straightforward way is to use two devices. a laptop (with additional screen reader software) to handle all my reading, writing and emails. For meetings, this means all the documents that I need to access, my notes for chairing or presentations, and for writing notes. This all comes through my left earphone. I use an iPad )with Apple’s integral screen reader) specifically to handle all the video calls (the meeting content plus the information that the screen reader also speaks).  This comes through another earphone into my right ear. So I’m constantly working on two devices each with its own earphone. I have had to take the decision not to listen to the text-based chat that runs alongside meetings because it can be so busy/frantic in a meeting and represents an often  constant stream of electronic speech that completely clashes with the meeting content – it is literally two voices speaking at once.

 

 

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