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Hosting Accessible Zoom Meetings

taught by: Jonathan Whiting


Session Summary

Learn how to create and host accessible Zoom meetings and webinars. Participants learn how to leverage the accessibility of Zoom features like captions, sign language interpreters, screen share, chat, and more.


Description

Find Hosting Accessible Zoom Meetings on the Knowbility Learning Center

Zoom—the most popular virtual meeting platform—includes many powerful features that support accessible meetings. Many of these features have pitfalls that hosts need to understand to make a meeting as accessible as it can be. For example: The new Sign Language Interpreter options give deaf participants the ability to interact with an interpreter in a resizable external window, but the process to show and hide interpreters is not intuitive. Captioners and interpreters must be made panelists if they want to join webinars early. The process to provide automatic captions has recently been updated to make it easier to implement in some ways but harder in others. These are just a few examples of potential pitfalls.

During this session, we will review many of these common pitfalls and, in most cases, ways around them. This includes auto and manual captions, sign language interpretation, the participant video gallery, screen sharing, chat, breakout rooms, and recording. We will also review principles of best practice for presenting and sharing your screen in more accessible ways and will practice this process together.


Practical Skills

  • Learn the pitfalls and techniques to optimize the accessibility of captions and sign language interpretation in Zoom.
  • Practice making your description of onscreen actions more accessible for everyone.
  • Understand accessibility of features and shortcomings of the following Zoom tools: chat, polls, reactions, and breakout rooms.