Accessible online meetings

When we host or participate in online or hybrid meetings how can we make them accessible to everyone?

Meeting setup

Think about the purpose of the meeting and how best this meeting can be facilitated: hybrid or online. If the meeting is hybrid, make sure the remote participants too get the full experience of the meeting.

If you are the organiser of the meeting, ask participants whether they have any accessibility needs. This can be accommodated in the event registration form for example. This will help you to anticipate accessibility needs and accommodate them. Remember to ask and accommodate any physical accessibility needs in a hybrid meeting.

Consider the length of the meeting. If the meeting is longer than say an hour, consider including a movement/comfort break as appropriate. 

Some colleagues may have back to back meetings. So could you schedule the meeting for 50mins rather than the full hour to help them get to their next meeting on time?

Agenda

Having a set agenda and sticking to it helps everyone to make the most of the meeting, especially for people with mental health difficulties and ADHD.

Resources

If you can provide the resource (for example, slides or documents) relevant to the meeting in advance, it will help people to prepare well in advance.

Make sure you create your resources with digital accessibility in mind. Visit the Resources section to learn more about creating accessible content.

Captions

In Microsoft Teams meeting, you can use the live captions from the meeting window.

Go to meeting controls and select More options ... > Turn on live captions

To learn more about enabling live captions visit Use live captions in a Teams meeting

Speaking clearly, using a good microphone (headset) and having quiet background will help caption accuracy.

Sufficient lighting

When you are speaking in an online meeting, it is helpful if you can share your video. If there is sufficient lighting, people who are hard of hearing or deaf may be able to lip read.

Use of headset and microphone

Using a good microphone and a headset will make it easier for people to hear you filtering out any background noise. This will also help the accuracy of captions.

Keep your microphone on mute when you are not speaking and remember to unmute when you speak.

Record meetings

Recording meetings will help colleagues who could not attend to later watch the recording. Also if there were a lot going on in the meeting and it was not possible to take notes having a recording will help.