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A Closer Look at Zoom’s Accessibility Features

A Closer Look at Zoom's Accessibility Features
A Closer Look at Zoom's Accessibility Features

In this article, we’re going to discuss about the accessibility features of Zoom. As many businesses and organizations are moving to this remote online video conferencing world, many of us are very fortunate to have our abilities whether it’s hearing or vision and having enough that we don’t need to use accessibility tools.

That is not the case though for 38+ million people in the United States that have loss of vision, impairments, suffering from seizures and others. They cannot do certain things with contrast or things that are flashy and move a lot on the screen.

So, as you are looking at providers to be able to connect with employees, customers and the public, then accessibility is something that is very important. And oftentimes, it’s one of those things that sometimes we don’t think about or we take for granted.

There are many web platforms that you can choose from when it comes to video chatting, video conferencing, web meetings, or virtual meetings. But there’s really only one company that has seemed to make a pretty good effort to assist this world in having a similar experience to what we have.

There’s some of the big ones that are somewhat disappointing because most of them have been around forever and they didn’t have nearly as many accessibility options as what Zoom had. And the thing is Zoom is a newer company.

Americans for Disabilities Act (ADA)

When the Americans for Disabilities Act was passed, it was the 1990 and this applied to our physical world. That was handicapped ramps, handicapped spaces, ramps on the street corners, so wheelchairs can wheel down and cross the street and wheel back up opposed to having curbs everywhere and making it virtually impossible. Well, at that time, the world of web wasn’t widely adopted.

Smartphones didn’t even exist so that accessibility law wasn’t even a thing. In the last couple of years, web accessibility or digital accessibility has become more important. This is something that, as business owners, as people that serve the community, serve the public, whether we’re government, whether we’re private, or whether we’re nonprofit.

We should want to have the same experience for all of our customers. And that applies to people that you work with, that you teach, that you interact with, that may have those impairments as well. So if you have a workforce that has shifted from a brick-and-mortar, a physical place of business and now they’re working from home, accessibility is something to think about for those that need it.

The Big Gap in Web Accessibility

Based on what we’ve seen after looking at several companies, there’s a pretty big gap when it comes to web accessibility and making video conferencing not as difficult. If you’re vision-impaired and it takes several steps or clicks or interactions to install something, then that’s hard. We have our vision so we can see that, for example, there is a link and we can see that so we can go to different places.

But for people that are visual impaired, they have to rely on what’s called a screen reader and screen readers are kind of painful. If the site doesn’t support it (screen readers), it’s just not easy at all so it’s our job to have websites, webpages, digital assets, and PDFs documents that screen readers can read. The burden is not on our customers or our employees to figure out is what we are trying to say.

So, let’s talk about Zoom and let’s look at the accessibility features that it has.

If you want to know more about Zoom’s accessibility features you can visit this URL: zoom.us/accessibility

Accessibility page of Zoom
Accessibility page of Zoom

As compared to other services, it seems that they are trying to do their best to serve and make this accessible for all. It may never be perfect because we all have different standards but we think that they’ve made a pretty good effort.

We design, develop, and test our products with accessibility in mind so that all users can meet happy.

zoom.us/accessibility

Closed captioning will allow third-party connections to create captions or it will allow you to turn on the closed caption feature for a meeting or a webinar. What that means is, it does not automatically create captions for you.

When you create closed captions, typically, you have to have a system that listens and translates the words like what Facebook does for videos or YouTube does for videos, or you have to give the software what the captions are, which is basically what you’re saying.

So if you enable closed captioning for Zoom, that allows you to have a closed caption button so whoever wants to see the closed captions, it turns that on and the closed captions appear at the bottom of the screen just like it would on your TV or a video.

They are not automatically generated so you have to have someone that is talking and someone else that is typing what that person is saying. Here, there are 3 things that you need to consider:

If you want to turn closed captions on, you have to do that on your Zoom admin panel that’s on the Zoom website. If you have a Zoom account and host meetings, you will be able to do closed captioning. You can do it at an account level so everyone has access to this feature.

Remember:

For this to work, you need a person talking, a person that’s typing the closed captions and someone on the other side that would want to be able to read those closed captions. Do take note that nothing is automatic about it but it is a feature that is valuable for those with hearing impairments.

Automatic transcripts

This is only for certain accounts in Zoom. There’s the free account and there’s other tiers of accounts. Automatic translation only works for cloud recordings. You cannot record locally to get this to work. It only works for Business, Education and Enterprise licensing with cloud recording.

If you want automatic transcriptions, it will take the audio version of what was said, create a file for that and it will create the transcriptions.

Do take note that the closed captions and transcriptions are not going to be perfect but it absolutely does help and saves time so it is better not to have the expectation that it is going to have everything that you said right. That it’s going to have the punctuation correct because it just can’t. The thing is, there’s a lot of subjectivity on how we talk; in different accents, tones and paces, and all these things are factors but it does the best it can.

The other thing is keyboard accessibility. This is important when people are visually impaired. They don’t have a mouse and they have often have keyboards that have Braille and they use shortcuts for what we would use as a menu so instead of clicking a file menu with the mouse, they know all the shortcuts such as to open up a new tab, a new window, etc.

Video conferencing
Video conferencing

It’s same thing in Windows. Everything that you can do with the mouse: every function, every copy, paste, edit, print, close, open, all of those have keyboard shortcuts.

What we were really impressed by was Zoom has a lot of shortcuts. To see those, you have to go into your Zoom (Desktop) client – this is what you download and install on your computer so you can start and schedule meetings.

If you already know how to mute your audio because you have a Mac, then you can just enable the global shortcut. Let them use what they’re used to using Push-to-talk, Start and Stop Video, Switch to Camera. All of these things that you see are global commands.

Most likely, if you know someone that uses keyboard shortcuts because they’re visually impaired, they know these. They know how to look at the shortcut that you can do on a Mac.

Another important matter is that you can use Zoom with a screen reader. As mentioned earlier, screen reader support is challenging and it’s painful and if you ever listen to it, you’ll understand how hard it is. The good news is that they follow the latest accessibility standards to make sure that it is fully accessible because they have a process around accessibility and testing. They test each version of their platforms so they are not just testing Zoom on the web alone but they’re also testing client meetings and rooms.

And the thing is, this is not something that companies are forced to do. This is something that they made an effort to do and the even have a document that goes through all of the things that they tested. This includes information includes accessibility controls like non-text content and other factors such as info on relationships, meaningful sequence, sensory characteristics, use of color, audio controls, keyboard controls, and others.

Here’s an informational video from Zoom on how to use their accessibility features:

Accessibility features: How to with Zoom

In general, we need to keep in mind and be cognizant of the people we serve, the people we work with and how we can make accessible easy or accessibility not as painful because it’s not fun  but it’s  important.

About the author

David Cote

David Cote believes that all users should have a reasonably equivalent experience when accessing a piece of content and that the WCAG guidelines can make this possible. He writes articles which may help website developers and designers to make their projects more compliant with these standards.

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