Accessibility Best Practices for Zoom Meetings

Transcript

Pat Kogos: Hey everybody. I’m Pat Kogos. If I have not met you before, I am the Director of Digital Accessibility here at UChicago. I am so happy to be with you today to discuss accessibility best practices for Zoom meetings.

We all have plenty of Zoom meetings. And the software changes over time and there’s lots of good things to think about. So we will be posting a link to today’s PowerPoint presentation in the chat for your reference if you want to follow along. I’m also going to be sharing my screen.

This session is being recorded in case someone wasn’t able to join us today and we’ll share it after we have a chance to human correct the captions. We generally share it with everyone who has registered for the session. At the end of this presentation, we’re going to have a Q&A period and that will be removed from the recording before we share it. So please feel free to ask questions at that time.

We are going to use the chat space today for link sharing and for asking questions if you don’t want to ask questions live. So we ask that you refrain from having conversations in the group chat to provide a more inclusive environment. And I will talk to you a little bit more about that as we get a little further into the presentation. Accessibility best practices for Zoom meetings.

As I have just mentioned, I’m Pat Kogos, the Director of Digital Accessibility. Our team, the Center for Digital Accessibility, the CDA, is part of the Academic Technology Solutions Team and IT services. So my other teammates are Emily Baker, Thalia Kapica, and Jack Auses. Emily is our moderator today. India Francis is also with us today. She is a senior IT analyst in IT services and she is a video conferencing specialist. So if we get into trouble and can’t answer any kind of Zoom questions, we may turn a few of them over to India. Thanks a lot India, for giving me some background about the Zoom technical side of things and helping prepare this presentation.

So the topics we are going to talk about today are, we’ll go through the settings that you as a host should put into place to ensure accessibility. We’re going to talk about what you can do in your registration form to help. Before the meeting, things that you might want to check off your list. Some in-meeting considerations. How to use live captioners and interpreters as far as the Zoom tool is concerned. How to record your Zoom meeting and why that might be important for people with disabilities. Some presenter guidelines and best practices and also as a participant in the meeting, what kind of settings you can use to ensure accessibility for yourself.

I have a few disclaimers here at the beginning. Software changes frequently, as we all know. We often like to just send people to vendor guidelines. So if you check out Zoom accessibility guidance for the most up-to-date information, I think that is a great place to start always. You may not want to enable some of the settings that we talk about in Zoom today for a variety of reasons. If you have any questions later as you’re working with your own settings and how to set up your meetings, any questions about whether something that you put in place will affect accessibility, you can contact the CDA team and Emily will be putting a link how to contact us in the chat.

There are some other recommendations that I will provide today that may not suit your specific meeting size, your specific audience, any security or privacy concerns you may have, etc. The list is long. We all have lots of things to think about when we are holding meetings. So insofar as accessibility can be at the top of your list, and we hope it is, we know that there are other considerations also. So please keep those in mind as well.

So the first thing I want to talk about is the settings that you as a host can do to set your meeting up properly. So I’ll show you in a few minutes where this is in Zoom, where you can get to these. So in your meeting settings, there’s a place called Schedule Meeting. And there are two things in there that I think are particularly interesting from an accessibility standpoint. The audio type: allow telephone and computer audio. This will help you to have the broadest audience who can all interact with your meeting. So that’s an important feature. Also, muting all participants when they join a meeting is really helpful. I think we’ve all been in meetings where somebody didn’t mute themselves and that’s so hard. It’s hard when you’re trying to have the auto captions be accurate. It’s hard for people to hear things properly. So those are both a really good place to start.

I have an illustration on this slide that I love to use because the UChicago inclusive illustrations, I always like to give them a plug. If you’re looking for graphics to use in presentations, it’s great to be able to use ones that are inclusive and we have lots of examples of this. This one is an example of a laptop that’s open and it has a virtual meeting going on with a grid of meeting participants.

So some other host settings that you can do are in the meeting part of your meeting settings. One thing is if you allow users to save chats from the meeting, that’s great. So you put all your links there, other pertinent information, and that’s a great way to give people options if they weren’t able to follow along with you during the meeting. Another thing you want to do is allow various types of captioning to occur.

As far as manual captions are concerned, there are two things you need to enable if you want to use a live captioner or if you want to also use the API token. So one is allow the host to type or assign a participant to type. So I think it’s fairly uncommon for the host to type the captions themselves, but we often have third party live captioners in meetings. And so you want to make sure that that’s enabled. You also want to allow the use of Caption API token to integrate the third-party closed captioning service. So there are various tools that are used by captioners and if you put both of those things on, it will allow your captioner the most flexibility. It will allow you to have other options outside of Zoom.

For automated captions, these are locked on by UChicago admin and so these are automatically on unless you are at the BSD or the Med Center. They’re not locked on there for HIPAA reasons. They use a live captioner when they need one. But for everyone else, these are on, and I’m super thankful about that.

English is the default language for this. But if you want to offer translated captions in the meetings you host, it might already be part of your configuration. You can check your settings and see. If it’s not already part of your account settings, you can submit a ticket to IT services. It’s a low cost add-on. They can set that up for you. If you want this to be able to be translated into a variety of languages. And there’s a pretty decent list of languages out there. It’s not all inclusive, but it’s a nice long list of options.

Some more host settings that could be really useful from an accessibility standpoint are that you want to allow the full transcript to be viewed in the in-meeting side panel. I often use this feature if I didn’t hear something and my captions went by too fast. People can go over to the transcript and scroll backwards in it so that they can see what happened that they might have missed. So that’s also a really useful feature to put in place.

And you want to allow people to save the captions. Allowing participants to save the closed captions of the transcript is also really helpful for many people. You may also share your video after the session and then make sure that you have human corrected those captions and we’ll talk about that in a minute too. But some people find it really useful to have that thought, whatever captions you provided in the meeting, available right away.

There’s also a place in your meeting settings where you can turn on the sign language interpretation view. You may or may not have a meeting that requires a sign language interpreter or someone has requested a sign language interpreter or you feel like an ASL interpreter might be really helpful in the meeting. There are a number of reasons why you would do this. But you might as well just turn it on now. It doesn’t hurt anything to have it on. and then you won’t even have to think about it later if the need arises. The host can assign the interpreters when scheduling it or during a meeting. Either way.

In people’s virtual backgrounds, some people have movement. It’s an animated virtual background. But motion can be problematic for some users. So there is a setting that you can turn off in your virtual background so that you don’t allow the use of videos as virtual backgrounds. I’m not sure what kind of message a user gets if they try to use a virtual background that’s moving and you have not allowed it but they get some sort of message and it’s not allowed and this really will help with some of your users.

So here’s something that’s still evolving and maybe one of the newest parts of Zoom. And I think a lot of people have reservations about AI and understandably so. So this is not going to be for everybody but if you decide that you want to offer the AI companion, meeting summaries can be really helpful for people with disabilities. You can make your own choice as to whether this is something you offer or not, but just know that people do find them useful.

If you do decide to enable the AI companion and you want to generate more accurate and relevant results, there is a setting you can turn on that’s called Use Screen Share Content with OCR. So screen sharing is also somewhat problematic for people with disabilities. And we’ll again talk about that in a minute. But this provides an opportunity if you have your AI companion on, to have your screen share content, parsed using OCR. And the image will be converted that you screen shared into machine readable text. This is not a perfect solution. All AI is sort of something we need to review. I personally have in my settings that I receive the AI companion materials after the meeting. Because if I wanted to share them with someone else, I really want to make sure they’re accurate in the same way we make sure our captions are accurate before we share them. But everyone has their own opinions on whether they’re going to automatically share them after the meeting with other participants, whether they just want them to come directly to the host for review before sharing.

But I would say no auto-generated anything is perfect, including AI companion, including auto-generated captions. So if you’re going to do this, I encourage you to spend some time looking at what’s been generated and see if it does really accurately reflect the meeting itself.

I’m going to pop out of here for a minute and show you where some of those settings are in Zoom. So here we are. I’m on a Mac. Everyone’s view may be somewhat different. I’m in the web client right now. So if you go to your settings and the meeting settings, this is the primary place where all of those settings were that I just mentioned. Mostly in this schedule meeting subnav or in the in-meeting basic and in-meeting advanced. Those three are where you will find the majority of all the things I just walked through. The other place we mentioned was this AI companion. There are lots of options in here. So I think it would be good if you’re interested in the AI companion. There’s a lot of documentation out there about the AI companion and you can do some additional research on your own about that.

So when you’re creating your registration form for your meeting, if people have to register, it’s important in your meeting description to include an accommodation statement. This is a great opportunity for you to find out if any of the people you’ve invited to the meeting have specific needs that could be met in order for them to fully participate. We have a standard statement we put in ours, but there are lots of statements out there. You might want to just check out a sample out that’s out in the web space. But we put in ours. “This virtual meeting will include Zoom’s automated “closed captions. “If you have any questions about access or would like “to request a reasonable accommodation to facilitate “your full participation, please contact digitalaccessibility @uchicago.edu.”

So it’s very important that someone has someone specific, an email or a contact person’s phone number that is also helpful, some way for someone to request accommodations. And then that can drive and should drive a lot of your decisions about your meeting. Everything we’ve talked about before this has been very theoretical. But if someone asks for a specific accommodation, that’s something completely different and really needs to be paid close attention to.

The other thing that’s important in your Zoom registration form is branding. There are two places where you can add images. And if you’re going to add an image there like a logo or something else, make sure that you add the alt text to those two images. That is done by what they call edit description. So I want to go out to that for a minute and also show you there.

So here we are in the meeting that we’re in right now. And the registration form that was set up for it right here. “This virtual meeting will include.” This is where we dropped it and we just put it right after the rest of the descriptions into the description field. I don’t think, it’s not gonna let me do some editing because we’re in the meeting. But here is the branding part where you can add either a banner or a logo image. And once you’ve uploaded that as we did here, this is where you can edit the description. And the description is what we put in here, the University of Chicago Center for Digital Accessibility. It’s exactly what’s in our logo so people using screen readers can hear that as an alternative. So make sure you use that as well.

So before your Zoom meeting, there are some other things you want to think about. Often we share materials in meetings. For the materials that you’re sharing, if you want them to be accessible to the largest number of people, if you’re going to be screen sharing them, often users with disabilities and many other users prefer to receive those materials ahead of time. So if you could send them out to registrants before the meeting, that’s great. We often see this in large meetings where people distribute materials ahead of time. Sometimes you’re not quite ready. Today I was working on my presentation, I would not have been ready to do that. But if you are, if you’ve got something in the can and you can share that ahead of time, it does help people to interact with it. That’s not always possible. So another alternative is to share it in chat when the meeting starts. You can share a link to it like we did today. Alternative 2, you can share it after the meeting is over.

The good thing about sharing your presentation is that all the links in the presentation will be usable for everyone. Maybe people don’t want to consume the video that you’re going to share with them the video recording. They would prefer to go through a slide deck or whatever material you have. So just lots of different ways for people to consume the same material. I think that’s one of the things we always think about is can we offer things in different formats so that people who want to engage with them in different ways have that opportunity.

A note about this is that screen reader users users often turn off their chat during the meeting because if that chat is trying to take over the screen reader at the same time the presenter is speaking, there’s lots of conflict going on there and it’s too much. It’s overload. It’s very confusing. So that’s one of the reasons why chat in the meeting itself, especially if the meeting is pretty large or the audience is unknown or you think you have a person with a disability in your audience, especially in those circumstances, definitely reduce the amount of conversation that goes on in the chat.

Other people also just find it very distracting to have lots of conversation in the chat. So users with cognitive disabilities also really have trouble with the multitasking part of seeing all the conversation that’s going on in the chat plus listening to the conversation that’s going on in the main meeting itself. So for many other reasons, people close that chat window. So if you’re going to post links to the chat, you mentioned that. So I mentioned at the top of our meeting, we are posting links in our chat, but we will also share our presentation. Our presentation is also in the chat, so there’s things in our chat. And if anybody can’t get to them, we are also happy to share them later.

The other thing is, if you’re sharing materials, not only do you want your Zoom meeting to be accessible, but you want all your shared materials to also be accessible. If you’re presenting with a PowerPoint presentation like I am today, make sure that PowerPoint is accessible before you share it with everyone. It’s just as important because sometimes that is how someone will most meaningfully engage with your content.

Once you get to your meeting and you’re in your meeting, again, as we mentioned, use chat primarily for introductions. Sometimes people like to just drop intros in the chat. Questions that we could circle back to later when get to a Q&A period, link sharing, etc.

Here is an interesting thing that we found out because we do share links a lot in our chat, is that if you are trying to do what we normally tell people to do, which is use meaningful link text, we want you to break or slightly bend one of the rules we usually say. And in this instance, if you’re sharing a link in the chat, put the meaningful link text plus the URL in the chat so that the URL will also be saved for future reference.

All conversations, as we said, should happen in the meeting itself. You want to encourage participants to virtually raise their hand when it gets to a Q&A period. This is not going to work for everybody. Not everybody wants to come off their audio. Not everybody wants to be on camera. So you can have some conversation going on in the chat. It could happen. The good thing is if you have allowed participants to save the chat, then later if someone missed that chat because they had the chat window closed, they can also still see it after the fact. So let participants know how to engage without giving some of these guidelines, people don’t really know what to expect.

When you’re in a Zoom meeting, there are a couple of features that we should talk about separately because certain things will be accessible and not accessible. Polling, for instance, is for the most part accessible in Zoom, but it’s not usable by people who are joining by phone. So if you know you have people joining by phone, you might want to offer an alternative if you’re trying to poll the group. Also, when you’re getting ready to launch a poll, it’s important to let people know that verbally. I think there are some hiccups that occur when the poll is launched that might not be announced properly. You want to allow plenty of time for participants to find and participate in the poll. Not everyone navigates in the same way, and it will take some users a little bit longer. So just make sure you don’t rush through your polling.

The other thing you don’t want to do is use reactions instead of polling because not all participants may be able to see the reactions before they disappear. Because reactions only stay in place for a short period of time and it may take some additional time for some users with disabilities to locate and enable their reactions. and they might miss out on the opportunity to be a part of the poll. So I would say polling is a good thing in general, as long as we do it with the poll.

For whiteboards, this is not going to be accessible to screen reader users in the same way that like what we share on the screen is not accessible. So just make sure if you’re using the whiteboards or if you’re doing screen sharing, you’re going to describe all visuals verbally. In the meetings, we often are using live captioners and interpreters, particularly if there is a request for them.

So you want to let users know at the beginning of the meeting. Let participants know what options are available to them in that meeting and how to engage with those options. The automated live captions are great for small meetings, for known audiences, for most of what we do. And I would say just like a small meeting format, they’re not accurate enough to be used to fulfill a captioning accommodation. So if someone requests a live captioner, please accommodate that. It may also not be sufficient for certain audiences. If you know your audience and feel like a live captioner would be better for your particular audience, I also urge you to do that under any circumstance where you feel like it’s best.

American Sign Language interpreters, ASL or other interpreters, you should spotlight them so they’re always in view for everyone during the meeting. You may need multiple interpreters depending on your meeting length because they swap out after a certain period of time. I’m not an expert on engaging with interpreters or live captioners, but there are plenty of people on campus that we could steer you toward that can help you with that.

So if you have a meeting and need a live captioner or an interpreter, please let us know and we can help point you to the right resources. If you are going to use breakout rooms and you have a live captioner or an interpreter in the meeting, you want to make sure that the breakout rooms are manually created so that people who requested an accommodation have their requested accommodation follow them into the breakout room, whether it’s the interpreter or the captioner.

Another thing is if you are recording your session, you can start with the auto-generated captions. But you want to make sure that before you share that with anyone, you human correct them. And if you’re going to allow for recording, when people go to breakout rooms, you may also consider whether you want to allow participants to record the breakout rooms as well. People with disabilities and lots of other users really appreciate having recordings for future reference.

Some presenter guidelines that are really kind of separate from the Zoom setup and Zoom settings are the things you can apply to any virtual meetings that you’re in. For better captions and transcripts and just to provide a better user experience overall, you want to speak slowly. It’s a challenge for me, but I always work on it in meetings. Speak slowly, clearly, and with sufficient volume. And make sure you check your microphone before you’re meeting so that there’s no interference or crackling going on. Reduce the background noise in the room that you’re in to ensure for the best possible captions.

Understand that some users may not want to be on video. So try not to require or even request everyone to be on video. This is really taxing for some people and also a really sensitive topic for some people. So make sure to embrace people the way they show up. We’re always happy to have you in our meetings. In your meetings, there are lots of visual things that may take place in many different formats. And you want to make sure you’re verbally describing all your visuals that have meaning.

There are also some settings that you as a participant can put in place if you need assistive technologies. These happen in your Zoom desktop client. This is where you can set them. There’s an accessibility space in your desktop client where you can access the keyboard shortcuts that you can use for easy navigation. You can also customize the font size of your chat and also of your captions.

And you can choose to dim your video if there are flashing images or visual patterns. So if this is a trigger for you, that’s something you should put into your settings. There are people who have problems, seizures, and also migraines, and a variety of other problems. So if you’re someone who’s sensitive to this kind of thing, please put that into your settings so that you don’t have to be as susceptible to those sorts of changes. And also you can customize your screen reader alerts because not everyone likes to have their screen reader announcing the same thing at the same time.

So that is most of what I have to say but I do want to just let you know there are lots of ways to contact our team. If you want to contact us to ask us further questions or for consultation or a specialized training session for your team or anything like that, you can contact our group at digitalaccessibility@uchicago.edu. There are also lots of resources about all things digital accessibility on our website, digitalaccessibility.uchicago.edu.