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.

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

'Are you causing trouble again?'

I can’t say how irritating, embarrassing and patronising it feels to hear the phrase: “are you causing trouble again?” used as a greeting to me in a kind of over-familiar, knowing, slightly too loud, falsely aspirant voice, intended more to be heard by others than for me.   It’s happened so many times over the years - in cafes, when I’ve been queuing at the counter, conferences when I’ve been trying to find somewhere to sit, arriving at a meeting and finding a seat or a cup of tea…   It often happens when I am in a less than familiar or uncomfortable situation , and never said by people who are close to me, but by people who don’t know how to be around me, people who perhaps have a view of me, their way of matching me with some stereotype of blind people that I can be slotted into.   I’m not a natural ‘trouble-causer’ )whatever that may be) or at least I don’t carry any trouble-causing that I might ex...
Read more

On-street greetings - continued

Following my earlier post, I realised that I hadn’t fully made my point and wanted to finish it.   Sight, with its ability to see faces, might provide ways in to a more connected experience of neighbourhood and community than blindness.  As people walk about the streets, nodding or smiling in acknowledgement of each other as they pass.  Without being able to see people’s faces, to see them making such non-verbal acknowledgement of my existence, I find walking around the streets of my neighbourhood an isolating  experience, passing countless people  in complete silence and at most moving out of each other’s way (other than those who know me). This is far more so for me in the city where there are people who won’t speak to each other, than in the countryside where I might encounter nobody.   I noticed people actually speaking to each other on the streets during lockdown – just saying ‘HI/Alright’ and hoped that the pr...
Read more

They just can't help themselves

I went for my first COVID vaccination at the beginning of March at my local health centre. After (fairly logically) queueing outside the main entrance for 10 minutes, I learned through overhearing a conversation at the front of the queue that the vaccinations were taking place in another part of the building with a different entrance. The health centre  had not thought to communicate this to their patients in advance as the written signs were expected to do the trick for everyone. The receptionist on the door apparently suffered from the (not uncommon) white stick blindness, and I realised that she was using gesticulations to indicate the direction I needed. After having explained that the white stick meant that I couldn’t see enough to follow her directions, I eventually found my own way to the correct (tucked away and locked) entrance. I (perhaps too politely) suggested that it would have been helpful if they could have tagged visually impaired patients in their database gi...
Read more