7 Ways to Make Your Zoom Meetings More Accessible
If you weren’t using Zoom before 2020, you’ve definitely been using it since. So much so that Zoom and other comparable platforms have become the new standards for company meetings and client calls. Whether your offices have remained virtual, shifted to hybrid or have returned to office—it has become commonplace to hold our internal and external meetings virtually.
While this has enhanced our meeting capabilities and has improved how we all connect and allowed for greater accessibility and flexibility for our teams—in other ways, it has inhibited accessibility for certain individuals.
Why is an Accessible Zoom Meeting Important?
It may seem that Zoom is intuitive for many, but that is not for everyone. There may be some individuals who are attending who need more accessible options. Creating an accessible Zoom meeting ensures that everyone present can understand, engage and participate in your meetings with little to no barriers.
As we strive to foster more diverse, inclusive and equitable environments, an accessible Zoom meeting is a way to take action on these efforts.
Even if no one attending currently requires any specific accessibility support, being proactive in the efforts and including these accessible options for your Zoom meetings will allow you to be proactive in providing this type of support you can integrate as your standard operating procedure for calls.
At times you may not know or have the opportunity to find out who requires this additional support, so preemptively including the below tactics to your meetings is a great way to prioritize including everyone in the meeting proactively.
How to Improve Accessibility of Online Meetings
Pre-meeting tips:
1) Include dial-in numbers
Dial-In numbers are the 10-digit call-in numbers individuals can use to access the relay service for instance, those in attendance who are hard of hearing would use the relay service to get sign language interpretation for Zoom meetings. Other individuals would use the dial-in number to allow text-telephone users to communicate with standard voice telephone users through specially trained Relay Operators or captioners.
Not only does providing dial-in numbers support individuals, but this also allows individuals who have lower bandwidth internet or those without computer access to still join and participate in the meeting. Including this in your meeting invite and email demonstrates your commitment to ensuring everyone can participate.
2) Provide presentation materials and schedule beforehand
It is common for meetings to include a visual demonstrative component, whether a presentation, any accompanying physical assets, or both. If your meeting consists of any of the above, it would be a good common place to start to provide these assets before your meeting. This ensures that individuals who may be neurodivergent have additional time to explore the subject before the meeting. This will also allow individuals with other accessibility needs to apply and prepare to manage their needs for the meeting.
If you are unsure if your physical assets are accessible, there are also ways to check they are accessible, such as the Accessibility Check Tool by Microsoft.
3) Mute all participants upon entry
We’ve all been on that Zoom call where someone has forgotten to mute, and their background noise overpowers either a speaker or simply takes up space while everyone signs in.
There are many ways we can ensure this is avoided and why this would be an important accessibility tool. Some in attendance who are neurodivergent may be sensitive to sound, so the background sounds of an unmuted individual or even background buzzing sounds could be a discomfort to these folks or possibly distract them from being able to concentrate on the meeting altogether.
Muting all participants upon entry would also support individuals with visual impairments. On Zoom, these folks can utilize screen readers that take the visual information being present and translate it to audio, so any excessive noise not limited to before (and during) the meeting should be minimized. It.
In Meeting Tips:
4) Announce who you are when you start speaking and describe presentation visuals
Using your voice as a descriptive tool is a great practice to bring into any Zoom meeting. In this sense, we suggest you set the standard with all attendees to announce who you are—name and title—before speaking on the subject. Another suggestion within this category is to verbally discuss and describe the content being shared on your screen or in the presentation so that everyone can access the information being shared.
This supports individuals, especially with visual or auditory disabilities or those using screen readers or sign language interpreters, as they may not be able to view or follow at speed intended the pace of different speakers or the shared content—again allowing everyone to be able to participate in the meeting.
5) Raise your hand in larger meetings instead of just unmuting and speaker
We’ve all had to adopt the special cadence on a Zoom meeting call—in-person and social engagements flow significantly more fluidly, and the virtual meeting has changed this. It is challenging to ensure that one person at a time can speak due to having to keep tabs on different attendee screens.
We suggest allowing everyone to have the opportunity to speak in addition to managing the flow of the meeting dialogue by making it a practice within the meeting that those who wish to talk can use the “raise hand” feature in Zoom.
If an attendee wishes to speak, but there is someone already speaking, selecting this emoji displays a “raise hand emoji” on this individual's screen, demonstrating that they wish to speak next. This allows the current speaker to finish their thoughts before another individual speaks. This also supports those who are neurodivergent with sound sensitivity, the one speaker at a time will support the challenges they may experience when there is excessive noise or “layered” noise of multiple individuals unmuted and speaking simultaneously.
6) Update your name and title and add your pronouns to your Zoom name
Zoom provides the ability directly in your meeting to update your name—we suggest making it commonplace for all in attendance to update your name, title and pronouns to how each attendee wishes to be referred—bonus point is that individuals can phonetically spell out their name as well!
This will provide additional accessibility and demonstrate your commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion for several reasons.
First, not all individuals are referred to by their full legal names. Some individuals may have longer legal names or names that are more common to their cultures than western culture— that they use on documents but go by either a condensed version of that name or a new name altogether. This provides the autonomy for each individual to allow that decision to be made, of how they wish to be referred, rather than assuming.
In addition to this, including your pronouns in your Zoom name will not only demonstrate to your attendees that you are an ally to those who are within the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. By asking all attendees to add their pronouns to the Zoom name, each individual will be referred to with their correct pronouns, not with what you are assuming they are based on their physical appearance.
7) Offer Closed Captioning, video transcripts and interpreters for the hearing impaired
An amazing benefit to Zoom for those who are hard of hearing or hearing impaired is that they both allow for manual closed captioning for their meetings and support integration with third-party closed captioning services and automatic closed captioning called Live Transcription.
If a meeting recording is being provided to all in attendance, a good practice is to offer the video transcript to anyone who needs it. You can either pay a video transcription service to do this more or have a team member take care of a task.
Hiring an interpreter for the meeting will also ensure an individual who is hard of hearing or deaf can access, participate and engage in a discussion properly. As a host, you can pin or “spotlight” the interpreter on the call so that everyone can visibly see the interpreter.
A great way to know which option to go with is to discuss with any individuals in attendance what their preferences may be.
Let’s Make Accessibility a Daily Habit
Adding accessibility to your Zoom meeting is no longer a suggestion but an expectation. Zoom offers multiple tools to support you as you work to make your virtual meetings more accessible for all in attendance.
It’s good to remember that accessibility is a spectrum, and proactively adopting the above actions and directly speaking with your attendees about their accessibility needs will set you up to make your spaces more accessible.