Difficulty of busy Zoom chat for screen reader users (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/7716703

Earlier this month I logged on to a Zoom webinar that had chat enabled. The meeting had a large attendance. The chat quickly filled up with dozens of people sharing their city or country, and later commenting on technical problems.

Some screen reader users had a difficult experience due to the heavy use of the chat. Here are three bits of feedback:

A comment reading "All this chatting is very disruptive to those of us using screen readers"

A question reading "Can people please stop messing up the chat? The preview is distracting."

A comment reading "The fact that so many of you type in the chat while the presentation is underway shows how few of you use screen readers."

What is your opinion on this aspect of videoconference chat etiquette? I'm not talking about offensive or dangerous content--just the volume of content.

Should frivolous chat messages be avoided, so that screen reader users don't miss important chat messages?
Or is important that chat can be a chaotic free-for-all, to get the full Zoom experience?
Does anyone have personal experience with this?
Does anyone have a preferred etiquette guide that covers this?

Thumbnail image is an illustration of over a dozen empty word balloons, overlaid on each other in a chaotic mess. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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[-] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It's possible to go into accessibility settings of zoom and control what messages are, and are not, read out. It feels to me like if the chat is distracting you, you're responsible for turning it off. Both NVDA and Jaws have scripts available that will allow you to do that with a single hotkey.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Thanks for sharing. It sounds like all the technology is in place for people to use or hide the chat as needed.

this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023

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