Welcome to the twenty-fourth episode of Access On, the National Federation of the Blind's Technology podcast.
Episode
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Timestamps
The show is segmented by chapter, making it easy to move between segments of the podcast if you have an app or player that supports chapters. Below is what's on the show this week, and when you can hear it.
- A guide to meetings in Microsoft Teams 0:00
- Navigation technology 44:34
- Wanting accessible dishwasher recommendations 45:36
- Tech tip, JAWS speech history 47:19
- Apple Watch water resistance, and hearing aid questions 48:50
- Netflix on Amazon Fire products 53:25
- How do I get audio description on YouTube TV? 54:13
- Apparent regression with Samsung TV accessibility 55:47
- Vector 57:46
Transcript
Jonathan Mosen: Welcome to Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. This week, we bring you a guide to using the online meeting capabilities of Microsoft Teams, thoughts on navigation apps as compared with standalone navigation devices for the blind, accessible kitchen appliances can be hard to find, someone is looking for an accessible dishwasher recommendation, and enabling audio-described content when listening to YouTube TV live or on demand.
It's Jonathan Mosen at the Jernigan Institute in Baltimore, Maryland welcoming you to episode 24 of Access On. Recently, we held an extended webinar on online meeting platforms and we're serializing this over the next few episodes of Access On.
We started last week with a little bit about meeting etiquette, or tips and tricks that can help you to be at your best in an online meeting, but now we're really getting into the nitty-gritty and looking at these platforms in detail.
And today, I'm taking you through Microsoft Teams. Now, for this demonstration, I am running JAWS, but throughout the webinar, I will be using keyboard shortcuts that work with any screen reader, so JAWS, NVDA, Narrator, SuperNova, whatever you choose to use, no matter which screen reader, these shortcuts should perform their described actions in Teams. By way of preamble, I would say that a lot of people talk with us about Microsoft Teams. And one of the frequent comments that we get is that on Windows, the application is accessible without it necessarily being efficient or easy to use.
It's a convoluted interface, and I must say that if I am using Teams, I do prefer using it on my smartphone because it's a more conventional user interface there. Teams can also be quite verbose, and getting the mix right between information that we must have and extraneous information that slows us down is something that we are continuing to talk to Microsoft about.
Like many modern Windows applications, Teams is an Electron app, and that means that it can appear to the screen reader like a webpage. Enabling your browse mode or virtual PC cursor may be useful in certain circumstances, but for the most part, you'll want to switch it off and use keyboard shortcuts, and the usual Windows navigation methods like tabbing, F6, and shift plus F6 are also very useful in applications like this.
So let's get started, and first, I'd like to take a look at scheduling a meeting in Microsoft Teams. Now I personally find scheduling a meeting in Teams to be an excellent user experience. If you're scheduling meetings with others in your organization, information about the availability of attendees is accessible and it's easy to get to as you go. And you may find that verifying availability on Teams is more straightforward than Outlook's scheduling assistant. So let's say that we want to set up a meeting for about now, and here's how we can do it.
So I'm going to go into the calendar. I am in the calendar already, but if you're not, you would open the Teams application, and I am using Teams, by the way, in a business environment, so the user experience is a bit different if you're using Teams for personal use. There was once a time, in days of yore, where they had two different applications, Teams for work or school, and a Teams for home. Now it's all one application and the user experience will differ depending on the account you have. So we're going with a corporate environment here for this one.
Speaker 2: Microsoft Teams web content profile two-page. Add title edit.
Jonathan Mosen: I have pressed now alt-shift-N, and that gets me into the new meeting screen. And I'm going to type...
Speaker 2: Testing in Teams.
Jonathan Mosen: And I'm going to press the tab key.
Speaker 2: List. Add required attendees, edit combo collapsed. Computer Braille.
Jonathan Mosen: Now I'm going to add my required attendees. These are the people that I really do have to have at this meeting and I am going to invite Karl and Kennedy to this meeting because you can never have too many meetings with Karl or Kennedy. So I go to start typing-
Speaker 2: K. Karl.
Jonathan Mosen: What I found is that with the first recipient that I try to type, I don't get any feedback, but if I down arrow-
Speaker 2: Karl, list, Belanger. Karl Belanger non-visual access technology specialist.
Jonathan Mosen: So I like this, it tells me Karl's name and it also tells me his title, and I can just press enter to add him to the invitation-
Speaker 2: Enter list, add required attendees, edit combo collapsed. Computer Braille. No suggested times available. Suggested times updated.
Jonathan Mosen: We'll get to that. Now I'm going to type K-E-N-N-
Speaker 2: K. Ken. Ken. Ken, list. Zimnik. Kennedy Zimnik non-visual access technology specialist.
Jonathan Mosen: And that time, it found Kennedy right away without me having to do a down arrow. So I'm going to press enter to choose Kennedy-
Speaker 2: Enter, list, add required attendees, edit combo collapsed, computer Braille, suggested times updated.
Jonathan Mosen: If you want to invite somebody outside of your organization, all you have to do is type their full email address and press enter and Teams will accept that as an external invite. You won't, of course, have access to availability information because we don't know whether somebody external to the organization is available or not. Now I can press the tab key-
Speaker 2: Add optional attendees button.
Jonathan Mosen: And we can add optional attendees, but we're not going to do that.
Speaker 2: Start date edit combo collapsed. 16/04/2025, computer Braille.
Jonathan Mosen: By default, the date will be set to today's date. If you need to change the date, you can press enter. We'll just do that and I'll show you how that is.
Speaker 2: Enter, calendar dialogue. April 2025. April 2025. 16 April 2025 selected current date. Calendar dialogue. April 2025. April 2025. 16 April 2025 selected current date.
Jonathan Mosen: It can be quite verbose, right? Now, if I press right arrow-
Speaker 2: 17 April 2025.
Jonathan Mosen: ... we're going by day now if I press the right arrow, but if I press down arrow-
Speaker 2: 24 April 2025.
Jonathan Mosen: ... we get to the 24th of April, which happens to be my birthday. Contributions via PayPal, always welcome. So I got to go up again.
Speaker 2: 17.
Jonathan Mosen: And left arrow.
Speaker 2: 16.
Jonathan Mosen: And now we're on today's date and I'll press enter, but as I say, by default, it will select today's date and it's really easy to navigate around the calendar. Now we are going to press tab to go to the start time field.
Speaker 2: Start time, edit combo collapsed, 2:00 PM. Computer Braille.
Jonathan Mosen: I'm going to leave it at a 2:00 PM start date and there's a reason for that, so I'll leave it there and press tab.
Speaker 2: End date edit combo collapsed. 16/04/2025. Computer Braille.
Jonathan Mosen: That's fine. We don't want that long a meeting.
Speaker 2: End time edit combo collapsed, 2:30 PM.
Jonathan Mosen: If I just down arrow once-
Speaker 2: 3:00 PM.
Jonathan Mosen: We've made that an hour-long meeting and the end date is now set to 3:00 PM. I'll press tab.
Speaker 2: Suggested times updated.
Jonathan Mosen: Now I'm going to come back to that in a minute. I'll just tab through this at the moment.
Speaker 2: Suggested time, 11:00 AM, 12:00 PM. Recurrence combo... Recurrence combo box does not repeat.
Jonathan Mosen: If we go into this by pressing enter, we can set recurring meetings up in Teams. So if you're meeting with somebody on Teams every Tuesday or the fourth Thursday of the month or any of that stuff, you can go ahead and set that up here. Right now, I'll press the tab because we don't want a recurring meeting.
Speaker 2: Add channel edit combo expanded. Computer Braille.
Jonathan Mosen: Now, here, we can add a Teams channel. If you don't want to invite an individual, but you do want to invite everybody who are members of a Teams channel, you can press enter, you can expand the Teams that you belong to with right arrow, you can choose channels and you can add a whole channel to a meeting at once.
So if you are working on a project, for example, with people who all share a Teams channel, and you want to catch up with them about how that project is going, then you can add everybody at once that way. But I'm going to press tab-
Speaker 2: Add location edit combo collapsed. Computer Braille.
Jonathan Mosen: Now we're dealing with Microsoft Teams meetings in this webinar, so you can leave that blank. The default is, in fact, a Microsoft Teams meeting if you're scheduling it from Microsoft Teams. But if you want to, you can type in, say, the name of a conference room. I'll press tab.
Speaker 2: Online meeting checkbox checked.
Jonathan Mosen: That's right.
Speaker 2: Bold toggle off toggle button pressed. Talk details for this new meeting edit. Talk details-
Jonathan Mosen: I just pressed tab a few times and now we're in your typical freeform edit field where you can type notes for the meeting. And you might want to include an agenda here or what you hope to achieve in the meeting, any guidance that might be helpful. You can just type text into here. I'll press tab.
Speaker 2: Add an agenda button. Who can bypass the lobby. More information graphic. Even if everyone is selected, your org policy may require certain participants wait in the lobby until a member of your org or a trusted org joins. This could include people joining without an account, people from untrusted orgs, and people dialing in. Syncing, dot, dot, dot.
Jonathan Mosen: All right, so there are all sorts of options there about who can bypass the lobby. If you do require a lobby for people who attend or if your organization has it set up that say external participants are always going to be placed in the lobby so you can verify that it's a legitimate form of access, then you would push control-shift-Y to let that person enter from the lobby and get into the meeting. So that's a very important command to be aware of.
Speaker 2: Who can bypass the... Record and transcribe grammatically. More information graphic. This will-
Jonathan Mosen: Now there's all sorts of options here. And if you were setting up a meeting, you can explore that. What I'm going to do is just tab back around-
Speaker 2: Settings and... Details, tabs, send button, menu, leaving menus, list, Belanger, remove Belanger-
Jonathan Mosen: Okay. We're back to our list of people who are invited to this meeting. If I left and right arrow through here-
Speaker 2: Remove Belanger, Karl Belanger, Karl tentative button dialogue.
Jonathan Mosen: ... what it tells me there is that Karl is being tentative. No, no, it actually says he's tentatively in this webinar. That means essentially that he may have another commitment. This is not a good time to schedule this meeting because Karl has another tentative engagement. If I keep tabbing through-
Speaker 2: Zimnik, Kennedy busy button dialogue.
Jonathan Mosen: And there's Kennedy and he's busy. So right there, right from this scheduling page, I can see right away neither of these two can attend the meeting at the time that I want them to. So I'll press tab-
Speaker 2: Remove Zimnik. Kennedy, add required attendees, edit, add optional attendees button, start date edit combo, start time-
Jonathan Mosen: And we've seen these fields before.
Speaker 2: ... end time edit... All day switch off. Suggested time 8:00 AM, 9:00 AM button.
Jonathan Mosen: Now we have some suggested times when everybody is available. So this is super cool. Teams is basically making it easy. I don't have to try and nominate a whole bunch of times until I find something that works. We can just see these times-
Speaker 2: 11:00 AM, 12:00 PM button. 12:00 PM, 1:00 PM button.
Jonathan Mosen: And it's only suggesting these times because all three of us are available. I know for example that I have a meeting at 10:00 tomorrow and that's why it's not suggesting that time.
Speaker 2: 11:00... Suggested.
Jonathan Mosen: So this is pretty cool, but I am actually going to send this meeting anyway, so I'm going to press control-S.
Speaker 2: Control-S. Calendar testing in Teams-
Jonathan Mosen: And it has done that already. So let's try and attend this meeting.
Speaker 2: Testing and Teams. Blindness... Testing in Teams. Wednesday, April 16th, 2025, 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM.
Jonathan Mosen: I'm back in the calendar and I pressed tab to get to testing in Teams. That's the meeting that we just set up. I'm now ready to try and join this meeting. One of the easiest ways to do this is to go to the application menu, so we'll press shift-F10.
Speaker 2: Chat with participants, join online.
Jonathan Mosen: And here we have join online. I'm going to press enter.
Speaker 2: Enter. Leaving menus. Microsoft Teams web-
Jonathan Mosen: Now at this point, you have not actually joined online. You are in the meeting details screen. And here, you can set if your microphone and camera are enabled before you actually enter the meeting. You will find those options if we just tab around the screen. So let's try that.
Speaker 2: Video settings button, audio options group, computer audio... Settings and more button menu. Choose your video and audio options for testing in Teams region. Need help, link, audio options group computer audio radio button checked. Computer microphone and speaker controls audio settings button. Microphone checkbox checked.
Jonathan Mosen: The microphone is checked.
Speaker 2: Speaker is on button. Speaker volume control left, right, slider, 100, cancel button. Join now with camera off and mic on button.
Jonathan Mosen: Before that, we had the video settings that were similar. You can have a checkbox that determines whether your camera is off or not. I am not going to try and jinx the world by having my camera on in two applications. I believe that that would be a very bad thing to do. So I've made sure that the camera is off but the microphone is on-
Speaker 2: Join now with camera off and mic on button.
Jonathan Mosen: ... and I can press the space bar-
Speaker 2: Space. Cancel button. You have joined the meeting. You are the only one here. Mute mic button, mute mic control plus shift plus M. Your microphone is unmuted.
Jonathan Mosen: And I'm the only one here. Now I am going to do something to set us up for a part of this demonstration that is to come. So bear with me. I'm going to tab-
Speaker 2: Leave, control plus shift plus H button. Settings and more button... Encryption status, mute mic button, mute mic control-
Jonathan Mosen: Okay, now I'm going to arrow around here. There's a lot. There's a grid of options here. I tabbed to get to these.
Speaker 2: Open audio options. Button collapse, share button, chat button, people button, raise button, react button collapse, view button, menu, notes button, rooms button, Copilot button.
Jonathan Mosen: And I'm going to turn Copilot on because I want to talk about it later. And if I turn it on now, we'll have some material to work with.
Speaker 2: Enter. Shared content view main region, turn on button. New notification, space. What language is everyone speaking dialogue. What-
Jonathan Mosen: I sometimes [inaudible 00:14:50].
Speaker 2: Close button. Spoken language combo box. English US.
Jonathan Mosen: Yeah, English US is fine.
Speaker 2: Cancel button, confirm button. Space. Copilot complementary region. Ask me anything about this meeting edit.
Jonathan Mosen: All right, I'm going to talk more about Copilot soon.
Speaker 2: Hide Copilot pane button.
Jonathan Mosen: I'm going to hide the Copilot pane for now so there'll be lots more on Copilot later. If you're attending a meeting where video isn't important, disabling video can vastly improve the quality of the audio in situations where bandwidth is limited. So we are now in the meeting and video is off and we're in pretty good shape. So inside the meeting, and hopefully, one day, colleagues might join in a real scenario, your focus will be in this meeting window.
So let's go through some of the key keyboard shortcuts and techniques for participating effectively in the meeting. One of the most common actions in the meeting is, yes, you guessed it, I'm back on this, mute and unmute yourself. Instead of hunting for the mute button, you can just press control-shift-M for mute to toggle your microphone mute status. So I'm going to try that, control-shift-M.
Speaker 2: Control shift M, your microphone is muted.
Jonathan Mosen: And we've got the confirmation that the microphone is muted. Luckily, it's only muted in Teams or you wouldn't be hearing me now. There is also a push to talk feature in Microsoft Teams. If you are muted, you can hold down control with the space bar and that will unmute for as long as you hold it down and it'll mute you again when you release it.
Now it may or may not be enabled right now, so it is worth verifying before you need to use it. And you can do that by going into Teams settings with the keyboard shortcut, control-comma, and you'll find the push to talk shortcut under the privacy tab. You can toggle your video the same way. You can press control-shift and O for video, I guess, to turn your camera on or off. In larger meetings, you might want to raise your hand to get the host's attention instead of interrupting-
Speaker 2: Your hand is raised. Your hand is raised.
Jonathan Mosen: And I have just done that by pressing control-shift-K to raise my hand. Everyone in the meeting sees a hand icon by my name now. You can press the same key, control-shift-K, to lower your hand. It's a toggle. Teams has a special shortcut for screen reader users. You can just press control-shift-L to have the announcement about who has their hands raised at the moment. So if I do it now-
Speaker 2: One raised a hand you. One raised a hand you.
Jonathan Mosen: Okay. But it would say, for example, that Karl Belanger or Kennedy Zimnik have their hands raised, if that is the case. This is super useful so that you don't have to dig through the participants panel to find who's waiting to speak. If nothing happens, you should ensure that your screen reader's focus is in the meeting window.
This feature works in supported screen readers when you're in an actual event. Alternatively, you can manage and check participants. We're going to press tab until we reach this rather busy toolbar for the meeting-
Speaker 2: Shared content settings and more button menu, encryption status, Copilot button.
Jonathan Mosen: We will last on the Copilot button, which is what had focus you see, but this is a very large toolbar and we can left and right arrow-
Speaker 2: Copilot apps button.
Jonathan Mosen: ... and for that matter, up and down arrow through all the options, not all of which, unfortunately, have shortcut keys. So you would tab to this toolbar and essentially arrow around-
Speaker 2: More button menu, more apps button, Copilot button, rooms button, break notes button, open notes, view button menu, check react button collapsed, raise button, lower your hand control plus shift plus K.
Jonathan Mosen: And it's telling me there that my hand is raised and it's giving me the lower my hand option.
Speaker 2: People button. One person with new activity, show participants.
Jonathan Mosen: Okay, so here is the people or participants list. And if I pressed enter to go in here, I would be in a list view, and then I would be able to tab into the list and I would be able to review who is in the meeting and also what their status is, whether they're muted, whether their hands are raised, all of that important information.
And that may be handy if you do need to try and mute someone yourself as the meeting host because maybe there's a little bit of background noise going on that you need to take care of. When you're done in that participants list, you can press escape or you can tab to the close pane button and that will close the participants panel.
If you want to read or send messages in the meeting chat, with focus on this large toolbar, you can arrow around until you find chat show conversation button and press enter, and then focus will go to the chat text box where you can type a message and you can press enter to send that message.
Your screen reader is going to announce new incoming chat messages automatically, it does a good job of that, while you are in the meeting. You can review them by shifting focus to the chat pane with shift plus tab and remember to return to the meeting controls after checking your chat. Sometimes pressing escape or closing the chat pane does help with focus being back on the meeting.
When you're on the meeting controls using the arrow keys will cycle you through all of these controls on the meeting toolbar that we just saw. If you ever feel lost in the interface, you can press control with period and that'll show you a list of all shortcuts in Teams. I do mean all, not just meetings, so this can be a lot. It can be a very busy list. There's also a more actions button that contains options like meeting recording, device settings, turning on live captions, et cetera.
And enabling live captions might help if you have anyone who is hard of hearing or you want a real-time transcript, and it doesn't hurt to turn it on for others' benefit. Now I want to talk about screen sharing in Microsoft Teams. Screen sharing is often crucial when you're running a meeting or giving a presentation. To invoke screen sharing in Teams, you press control-shift-E to open sharing options.
Speaker 2: Share content control plus shift plus E. Share content dialog, share content, include sound switch off, share content dialog, share content, include sound switch off.
Jonathan Mosen: Once the share tray is open, as it is now, you can share your entire desktop, and this is useful if you plan to alt-tab through multiple applications to demo something. In the share tray, Teams will have a desktop item. You can press tab until you get there.
Speaker 2: Presenter mode.
Jonathan Mosen: What I find-
Speaker 2: Add background button, choose screen list, wide viewing angle and high density flex view display 1920x1200, choose screen list, wide viewing angle and high-
Jonathan Mosen: Okay. So now I'm being asked to choose my screen. And if I pushed enter on this, and I'm not going to try and share my screen in two applications, but once I press the enter on this, I would be sharing everything except maybe notifications. Your screen reader will still be running.
Speaker 2: Syncing, dot, dot, dot.
Jonathan Mosen: ... but keep in mind, nobody's going to hear your screen reader unless we go back.
Speaker 2: Presenter mode. Include sound switch off.
Jonathan Mosen: And we'll push space to include sounds. If you're using multiple monitors, it's going to list each monitor as something like desktop one or desktop two or something. So you would need to select the monitor that you want to share. If you only want to share one application, say, Microsoft Excel or a browser window and nothing else, let's go through and see how we do that.
Speaker 2: Presenter... Add background button.
Jonathan Mosen: I'm pressing tab.
Speaker 2: Choose screen list.
Jonathan Mosen: And I'll go past that one.
Speaker 2: Choose window list. Opens list of four active windows. Choose window list.
Jonathan Mosen: And it tells me there are four active windows. If I press enter-
Speaker 2: React button collapsed. Send a reaction, share content... Window testing in Teams, Microsoft Teams, window calendar testing in Teams pre-web in our Microsoft Teams, window online meetings, Reaper v7.36 registered.
Jonathan Mosen: Okay, and I'm recording in Reaper so I'm going to press escape, but those are all of the apps that I can share because they are open on my computer right now. So I'm just arrowing to the app that I want, and then if I want to share directly from the app, I can just press enter to choose it. Your screen reader will announce each window title, and once you press enter, you'll also get confirmation about the window that you are sharing, and then participants will see only that program.
If you were to alt-tab away from the window, they would still see the last frame of that program. So it's a bit safer, privacy-wise, than sharing your whole desktop. There's also an option for a whiteboard and you would press enter to start this collaborative whiteboard session. Now since whiteboards are mostly visual, I'm going to skip the details here, but just know that it is there.
Screen readers can read some content on the whiteboard like text that's been added, but, of course, drawing, which a lot of people do on whiteboards, is not accessible. You might have some luck with performing OCR on it, but it could be a bit arduous. If you plan to share a video or audio clip and you want participants to hear the computer's sound, just to emphasize, you will need to do what we did there and enable the include sound option.
When the share tray is open, you will just tab to that and you would press the space bar to toggle the checkbox. By default, it is off, so you have to expressly turn it on each time. This option is only available when you're sharing your desktop or certain windows. It's not available when you're sharing some windows. It will then route your PC's audio into the meeting. Only do this when it's needed.
If your screen reader is chatting away and system audio share is on, participants may hear your screen reader. If you're sharing audio on a regular basis, it might be a good idea to invest in an audio interface with two outputs or a second audio device of some kind. Even a USB headset, as I mentioned earlier, would do the job.
For example, if you're using a microphone headset, you may have your screen reader come through that headset while all other sounds default to a default sound card like your computer speakers. And in this way, you can share audio, if you've got a video clip to play or something like that, and still have your screen reader chatting away to you because it's on a separate device from the default audio device that's being shared. And it's not that hard to set up.
It sounds more complicated than it is, but it just seems so much more professional because listeners aren't getting your JAWS or NVDA speech, but they are hearing what you want them to hear.
After you're done presenting your screen, you will want to stop sharing promptly so that you don't accidentally broadcast something unintended, and it's a toggle so you can just press control-shift-E again to stop your screen sharing. Now screen sharing is one thing, but what about sharing PowerPoint slides more effectively? This is where Teams really shines because it offers a PowerPoint live mode, which can be fantastic for blind presenters and attendees alike.
This feature in Teams allows you to upload or share a PowerPoint file directly into the meeting itself rather than just sharing your screen while you're running PowerPoint. Now the big deal about this is that other participants can navigate the slides on their own without disrupting your presentation and screen reader users can actually read the slide contents through Teams, so it makes the slides accessible and that's not the case with a normal screen share.
So let's say that you wanted to share a PowerPoint presentation about the formation of The Beatles.
I use this example because, in our last boutique, we did a presentation, we put one together on this very thing. So you would open the share content menu again, you'd press control-shift-E as we did before, but instead of choosing a desktop or a specific window, you would just keep tabbing around and looking for the PowerPoint section in the share tray.
It may or may not be there, I'll explain that in a little bit, but Teams will typically have a list of PowerPoint files that you're working on right within the sharing menu. When you reach this section, use the down or right arrow key to browse the list of recent PowerPoint files. Once you hear the one that you want, you just press enter. Now Teams will load that PowerPoint into the meeting using PowerPoint live. If your file isn't in the recent list, you don't need to panic. There is an option called browse OneDrive or another one called browse my computer in that menu, and this will open a file picker where you can use the arrow keys to locate your files either in OneDrive or in your local computer.
And you just select your file, and press enter, and it will upload and start sharing. These PowerPoint files don't just magically appear, do need to be in your corporate OneDrive. So if you don't see any PowerPoint files appearing or you don't see the ones that you want, even though you've accessed them recently, chances are that's because they're on your local computer or they're in another file cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive, but you can browse to them and upload them that way. Once you have loaded the file, you can now present the slides.
And what's cool about this is that your focus remains in Teams. You are not having to run the PowerPoint application and you can use the left and right arrow keys or page up and page down to go to the previous or the next slide. Pressing right arrow should advance to the next slide and your screen reader will probably announce slide two and the title of the slide, et cetera, as you do. All attendees will see the slide changing.
If you want to read the slide content yourself, you can press tab until you reach the current slide content pane, and depending on the screen reader you're using, you may need to enable a browse mode or virtual cursor mode to actually get at the content, but essentially you can arrow through the slide text and it'll be read out loud to you and that is a huge benefit.
Even though the presentation process is accessible this way, as you present, you want to describe the important visual content for any blind attendees, because not everybody's got a Braille display and it may be very distracting for some people to listen to you present and listen to the PowerPoint slides at the same time.
So it doesn't get you off the hook in terms of being a good accessible citizen and speaking to your own slides. By default, while you're presenting with PowerPoint live, your attendees can independently move through the slides on their own without affecting what everybody else is seeing. For example, another user might scroll back to a previous slide to reread something, and Teams lets them do that.
They can hit a sync button, and when you press that button, that will put them back to where the presenter is. It's like the SiriusXM app where you can wind back, and then hit the sync to live button. Now for a blind attendee, this is gold, because you can review the earlier slides at your own pace, you can read ahead a bit without interrupting if you want to, and if the screen reader doesn't catch something, then you can navigate back and read it again.
If you don't want this to happen... I mean, let's say for example, I'm just thinking of it, maybe you're running a quiz. You might be running a quiz via PowerPoint and you want everybody on the same slide so that nobody's skipping ahead to get the answer to the questions. You can lock it down. There is a control for that and you can press tab until you find prevent participants from moving through shared presentations on their own, and you press that button by pressing enter to toggle it, and then they will be locked in step with what you are showing, but it will still be accessible.
When you're done with the slide deck, you should be able to press control-shift-E and that'll stop the sharing. When I do this, I find that I can still interact with the slides on the screen, and this may be an accessibility bug or some other bug. So to be sure, I've gotten into the habit of quickly sharing my screen elsewhere, and then stopping sharing, it's just a few-second process, and then the PowerPoint seems to disappear for me. But without a doubt, this is the most accessible way to share a PowerPoint presentation that is built into any online meeting platform that I have found.
Let's talk about Copilot. We set up the scene for this. You may have heard about the new Copilot in Microsoft 365. Copilot is an AI assistant which is integrated into various apps including Teams. And it can quickly summarize spoken content or help you catch up on things that you might have missed if you were late to the meeting. It's like having a smart note-taker, really, an analyst at your side.
In your Teams meeting, Copilot is an AI tool that listens to the meeting via the transcript and it can answer your questions or it can generate useful information in real time. For example, you could ask Copilot who said they would handle the budget review or what are the key takeaways so far, and it would analyze the meeting transcript and give you an answer. It can capture important discussion points [inaudible 00:33:36] who said what and who agreed to what. And even suggest follow-up tasks all in real time.
So you can think of it as a contextual chatbot for your meeting. For these options to be available to you though, there is a caveat, your organization needs to have purchased Copilot and given you access to it. So, typically, Microsoft charges a flat amount per user and the organization has to buy sufficient licenses, and then assign one of those licenses to you. Go lobby your friendly IT head today.
When you are in a Teams meeting, you can press the tab key. We'll just get back there.
Speaker 2: React button, raise button, people button, chat button, share button, open audio, unmute mic button, open video, turn camera on, more button menu, apps button, Copilot button.
Jonathan Mosen: The good thing about this huge toolbar is that it does wrap, so you can use left and right, up and down and you will eventually find it. So I'm going to presenter on Copilot.
Speaker 2: Copilot complementary region. Ask me anything about this meeting edit.
Jonathan Mosen: We set this up. So at the beginning, what happened was we found that Copilot wasn't on, so I enabled it right at the beginning of this meeting, and Copilot has been working away ever since. So the Copilot pane is basically a chat interface where you can type questions or commands. The focus usually goes to the text input field where you can type a question. So I'm going to now type...
Speaker 2: Summarize what happened in the last five minutes.
Jonathan Mosen: ... summarize what happened in the last five minutes-
Speaker 2: Enter. Prompt sent. Summarize what happened in the last five minutes, generating a response. Receive response, star, star, summary of the last five minutes, star, star. Star, star, Copilot discussion, star, star. Jonathan mentioned that he will talk more about Copilot later and decided to hide the Copilot pane for now [inaudible 00:35:38] content equals left brace, source, transcript, link text.
Jonathan Mosen: Okay, so I'm just going to press shift-tab to get to the actual-
Speaker 2: And I generated content. Make sure to check... You said summarize what happened in the last five minutes and I generated content. Make sure to check for accuracy, dot, summary of the last five minutes, Copilot discussion, Jonathan mentioned that he will talk more about Copilot later and decided to hide the Copilot pane for now.
On video and audio quality, Jonathan advised that disabling video can improve audio quality in meetings where video isn't important, especially in bandwidth-limited situations to meeting setup. Jonathan confirmed that the video is off and the meeting is in good shape. [inaudible 00:36:14] and meeting, Jonathan emphasized that, in a real scenario, the focus should be on the meeting window for keyboard shortcuts.
Jonathan discussed key keyboard shortcuts for effective participation, particularly the shortcut for muting and unmuting the microphone, control plus shift plus M five 2:05 PM.
Jonathan Mosen: I tell you why. I'll tell you why I did it, because I muted the audio to demonstrate the mute command, and then I didn't unmute the audio so it's not getting any audio. So that makes perfect sense. It's just been sitting there in silence because my audio is muted. So don't worry. Copilot really does do what it's supposed to do.
You can use pre-suggested prompts if you want and they are offered to you so you can tab through the pre-suggested prompts, choose one you want, and then you can press enter to accept that one. Let me offer a few more example questions that you might like to try because Copilot is really cool and powerful. You could say, for example, list the agreed action items, what did we discuss about deadlines in the last meeting.
And if Copilot was active in the last meeting on the subject with these participants, it usually does a good job of reminding people and you can... Because Copilot is private to you, you can be pretty impressive to people and say, "Well, I recall at the last meeting, this is what we discussed."
After the meeting, Copilot can also help produce a recap for you or full meeting notes that you can send to other participants. It can also identify who said what, and that's useful if voices are familiar and you're not sure who made a certain comment. Copilot relies on the meeting being transcribed in real time to work effectively. In many organizations, if Copilot is enabled, it will automatically start a meeting transcript behind the scenes, even if it's not visible to everybody so that it can do its analysis.
If your meeting is confidential, and recording and transcription is off for some reason, Copilot won't really be able to do very much. It will be operating in a limited mode. Just remember, it is AI, so it strives to be accurate, but there might be occasional misinterpretations, so use it as a helpful guide and not absolute truth.
Now I want to move on from AI assistance and talk about a more audio-centric feature, and this is spatial audio in Teams.
This one can make a big difference in how you experience the voices in a meeting, especially if a lot of people are talking and this aims to recreate a 3D audio experience in meetings. Basically, it makes it sound like each person's voice is coming from a distinct direction or a position instead of all audio being monophonic.
The idea is similar to being in a room. If Kennedy is sitting to my left in the Teams gallery view and Karl is on my right, then I would hear Kennedy's voice slightly from the left and Karl's slightly from the right. And I quite like this because it gives me a visual concept of how the screen is looking, how the screen is laid out.
It can also help when people talk over each other, naughty, naughty, our brains with stereo sound can do a little bit of a better job of separating simultaneous voices. This is a phenomenon known as the cocktail effect in psychoacoustics. It is not on by default, so if you would like to try this, you will need to go into the Microsoft Teams settings.
Again, that is control-comma, and you go into the device settings, you will find a checkbox to enable spatial audio. You can give it a go and see if you like it. You can always disable it if you don't. Now meetings aren't just for desktops. You might be on the go and you might need to join via your smartphone. Microsoft Teams has mobile apps for iOS, so your iPhone and your iPad, as well as Android, and they are accessible with VoiceOver and TalkBack respectively.
So I'll just cover a few pointers for the mobile experience. The Teams iOS app is generally very accessible. All the buttons are clearly labeled and you just swipe through the interfaces you would expect. As I say, I personally find the iOS app a lot more pleasant to use and conventional than using Teams on the desktop, but if you use something enough, you get used to anything.
When you're in a meeting on your iPhone, VoiceOver will automatically announce important events like when someone joins or leaves the meeting or when somebody raises their hand. The main controls are typically at the bottom of the screen. With VoiceOver, you would use a one finger swipe left and right, just flick through to navigate those buttons. The all-important mute button will be one of these, so you can just double tap to toggle it, and there are other buttons like participants, chat, raise hand, and the more button as well, and they're all accessible via that swipe and double-tap method.
The Android app is similarly accessible. You swipe left and right to move through the controls, you double-tap to activate. The layout is a little bit different because of the Android user interface, but conceptually, it is the same.
TalkBack should also announce things like whether you're muted and unmuted, what you're toggling as you do so, and whether there are hands raised. And if you open the participants list, you should be able to get all of that info just fine. Some users are reporting that the iOS version is a little bit more polished in announcements, but Microsoft works to keep the apps at parity, consistent with one another.
If any unlabeled elements appeared, then usually they will fix it in updates quite quickly. And finally, in addition to what's built into Teams, there are some external tools and techniques that can help you be even more efficient or fill in accessibility gaps. If you are a JAWS user, there are specialized scripts, for example, from Hartgen Consultancy, at H-A-R-T-G-E-Nconsultancy.com, and they are designed to really give you a lot of additional capacity, and efficiency I think is the word I'm looking for, in Microsoft Teams.
And these JAWS scripts for Microsoft Teams, which you do have to purchase, can do things like announce automatically when people are joining or leaving, when people are raising and lowering hands, and all these things are configurable so you don't have to scramble around and nook for that information. They also streamline a lot of the verbose messages.
You can actually upload notification rules that make Teams a lot less verbose, which some of us really do appreciate because Teams is quite a verbose program. You can customize your messages on the Braille display as well as speech. They can also provide keyboard shortcuts that aren't actually built into the application.
I haven't covered those here because I want this to be generic to all screen readers, but there are a bunch of efficiency hits that you can benefit from in the Microsoft Teams scripts that are commercially available.
Narrator is worth a mention because that's Microsoft's own screen reader. They have made some customizations, not scripts as such, but they know you're in Teams and it does play pretty nice. Narrator has come a long, long way in the last few years. It's not as flexible as NVDA or JAWS is, but if you're in an application that Narrator has chosen to spend some time on, like Microsoft Teams, it can be very effective and it's worth checking out to see what you think of the experience.
Speaker 3: Stay up to date on both local and national news by subscribing to NFB-NEWSLINE, a free audio news service for anyone who is blind, low vision, deaf-blind, or otherwise print-disabled that offers access to more than 500 publications.
Emergency weather alerts, job listings, and more. Sign up at nfb.org/nfb-newsline.
Jonathan Mosen: Debbie Gillespie is talking about the subject of AI and travel, and she says, "Hi, Jonathan. Great demos of the AI tools for navigation in Access On. I class navigation apps into two categories. Those for phone and standalone units. Each has its advantages, but overall, I have found the standalone products more accurate and tailored to the specific requirements of blind users. My favorite is the StellarTrek from HumanWare. I've been using their products since 2007.
The downside of the Trek is the price, but it has a suite of on-board applications and two cameras to assist with real-time navigation. What I tend to do is use the map browsing mode to virtually walk the space or preview a route between two points. Love the show and the way you present information to the listeners." Thank you so much, Debbie. I appreciate that and the information that you provided.
Rick Roderick says, "Hi, Jonathan. Our dishwasher died a couple of days ago. The one we had was not particularly accessible. Do you or your listeners have suggestions for a replacement?" Good question, Rick. Thank you for raising this one. I'd be interested in some answers too.
We've just moved into an apartment, and for those who are outside of the United States, what happens here is that when you move into these apartments, it's typical for appliances like dishwashers, and refrigerators, and microwaves to be provided. Interesting experience during the whole apartment living thing here in the United States, and we've got a dishwasher that is a little bit challenging from an accessibility point of view. And I suppose accessibility is a matter of degree here.
Some people might be happy with one that just has physical knobs you can feel by touch where everything is set. You might memorize the order of the clicks, and I certainly have owned dishwashers like that in the past.
Or perhaps you're looking to go the whole hog and have something that's controllable with an app so that you can do all the eco settings and the special programs that some of these things have. That would be very interesting to see if there are dishwashers with that degree of accessibility. So if anybody has any thoughts on this, do be in touch.
And the email address, if you have something that you want to comment on or you want to raise something new is accesson, that's all joined together, @nfb.org. That's [email protected]. You can attach an audio clip if you want to record something on your voice memos app or something like that, or you can just write the email down.
And if you are a member of the National Federation of the Blind, do let us know what chapter you're coming in from so we can give a shout-out to that chapter. Carl Smith is writing in from the Salt Lake City chapter of the NFB of Utah where they have just had a convention. I know that President Riccobono was in attendance and I'm sure a splendid time was had by all.
Now Carl says, "I just finished Access On podcast 22 and was interested in the discussion about copying from the web. I was aware of the bug with Chrome browsers and of the recent fix, but I wanted to suggest one other copy solution that can be helpful in some situations. Often, if I come to a link on a webpage or an email address in a message and want to know how some words are spelled or when copying from email and discovering that most or all of the email was copied when I only wanted a small part, I use the JAWS speech history.
After hearing the information you want to copy, just press the JAWS key and the space bar, and then H, which brings up the speech history in the virtual viewer. At the bottom of the display is the most recent information spoken by JAWS. You can simply highlight whatever information you want and use the standard Windows copy command.
Afterwards, press escape and the virtual viewer disappears and you can go back to what you were doing and paste the information. Thanks for your work on the podcast."
Well, thank you Carl. That is a very good tip. We could even call it our tech tip for this week, if you like, because that's a jolly handy thing, the speech history. And this email comes from Pam Walters and she says, "I have the Ultra 2, and you can go to settings and turn water lock on and you can swim and use it in the shower too."
Now, for those who aren't aware, Pam's talking about the Apple Watch Ultra 2. You know can. And I do know people who wear their Apple Watch in the shower and there's no reason that I can really fathom, as long as you're careful not to get it too soapy. I think that's one of the caveats that you get, but you should be able to wear the Apple Watch in the shower. I'm just too chicken to do it. I'm just too chicken to do it.
But I know a lot of people who do and who haven't had any ill effects of wearing their various models of Apple Watch in the shower.
Pam says, "What is the difference between the Oticon hearing aids and the Phonak hearing aids, and what version do you have?" Okay, well, they're really just different manufacturers, Pam. It's like saying, "What's the difference between a Samsung TV and an LG TV or an iPhone and an Android phone?" They do things slightly differently. They believe they're the best.
There's a lot of competition going on in the hearing aid industry at the moment with respect to artificial intelligence and the way that some of these AI algorithms are now able to filter out background noise in the most extraordinary ways. I mean, they're doing some really cool digital processing.
Both Oticon and Phonak are leaders in this space, so there may be various factors that influence which one you go for. If you need hearing aids and you're thinking about what to go for, it's good to find an audiologist who will let you trial both.
And of course, for blind people, there are some additional complications. How accessible is the companion app for the hearing aid that you've chosen? The Phonak app is in pretty good shape at the moment actually from an accessibility perspective.
When I last looked at the Oticon app, it was less so, but I should say it's been about a year since I checked and that's a long time in technology. So it's always good to evaluate based on the current version of the app and that's another good reason to try these aids and just see how good they are.
Sometimes you can download an app from the store, be it Google Play or the iOS App Store, and play with it enough to know whether there are significant accessibility problems. With the new Phonak aids, there does seem to be an issue at the moment where if you play some content, say, a podcast or an audible book or music, sometimes I'm hearing that VoiceOver is not always coming back. There are a couple of aids with this problem at the moment, actually, not just Oticon.
And also that there may be some droppage in my ear with the Phonak aids. So I'm not saying these affect everybody, but they are affecting some people. So it's a complex business when you get so many interacting technologies and you're trying to troubleshoot where the problem lies. I have the previous generation of the Phonak aids now, and one of the reasons why I personally do this and I raise it because I think there is a blindness factor in this.
The newer aids from Phonak I don't believe have a replaceable battery version at this point. I do a lot of international travel... At least I was doing a lot of international travel, and I can wear my hearing aids for long periods, sometimes 18 hours a day. And I really am concerned about the idea of going flat when you really need to hear.
If you're out somewhere traveling and something happens, and your hearing aids go flat because maybe the recharging process went awry or any number of reasons, and you just can't pop in another set of batteries, that personally worries me.
Other people may have different thresholds for this, but I think this is a factor because if you're blind and you significantly rely on hearing aids to get about the world, and the hearing aids go flat and you've got no way of getting your audio back, that's a worry. So I personally like the versions that have a battery that you can pop in.
And even with the amount of streaming that I do, I'm connected to streaming all day long in my office at the Jernigan Institute, I'm streaming from my phone when I'm not at work, and I can probably get about eight days of battery life before I have to change the batteries, and I really do like that. So that's something to consider, but that's one reason why I've not investigated the new aids yet and I hope that Phonak will come out with a replaceable battery version.
Dennis: Hi, Jonathan. This is Dennis from Huntsville, Alabama. I was calling to help Tom with his Netflix problem on his Fire TV Cube. The problem that I had was on a Fire Stick, and whenever I would lose the speech in the Netflix app, you uninstall the app on the device, and then reinstall it and sign back in and everything should work well after that. Turning off VoiceOver and turning it back on sometimes would work, but I found that if I uninstalled Netflix and reinstalled it, it seemed to solve the problem pretty much.
So I hope that helps Tom and anybody else that has this problem. Really love the podcast. Thanks for all you do and talk to you soon. Thanks, Jonathan.
Jonathan Mosen: Thank you, Dennis. Here's David Cleveland who says, "Hi, Jonathan. I have been enjoying the new podcast. You mentioned in the last episode that SAP was available on YouTube TV. I have had the service for several years now and have not been able to access AD, that's audio description, on broadcast channels, whether they be live or from DVR.
Can you please explain how to get SAP to work?" I'll do my best, David, and I hope this helps. When you're playing a live TV channel or content that you've downloaded that has audio description available, swipe through the playback controls that are on the screen when a video is actually playing, and you'll find a more actions button.
When you double-tap that, there are various things such as captioning and statistics, and the option you want is not always there because there isn't always a secondary or supplementary audio program available to you. But where it is, you'll find a button that says primary. If you double-tap the primary button, you will find that you can swipe through to choose primary or secondary, and that relates to the audio.
If you select secondary, you will usually get audio description if it's available. Now, the important thing to note is that you can't turn on audio description right across the board. You have to do this for every channel. But in my experience, once you've done it for a channel, it seems to remember the audio feed that you've wanted. So once you've got audio description working, when you revisit that channel in the future, audio description should stay working.
Gareth Williams is writing in and says, "Hi, Jonathan. Having been a regular Living Blindfully listener in the UK, it is good to have tracked down your new podcast. A couple of years ago, I bought a Samsung TV with which I have been very pleased. One reason for buying it was the SmartThings app, to which it can be connected on my iPhone.
This was useful for searching for TV programs on the various apps to which I am registered, such as the BBC's iPlayer. Unfortunately, when Samsung last, quote, improved, unquote, the app, they made it unusable for this purpose. When the TV is selected, you are taken to a screen for choosing how to use your phone as the TV remote control. With sighted assistance, I have ascertained that the search facility is available on this page, but the icon is neither visible nor actionable using VoiceOver.
If I turn off VoiceOver and tap the screen in exactly the right place, I am sometimes lucky enough to get the search function to work, but this is very hit-and-miss.
I have contacted Samsung, but have been unable to get to anyone who has the remotest idea what I am talking about. I am wondering if your organization, with far more clout than I, would be able to resolve the problem." Let us have a look into this, Gareth. This does sound like a regression, and that's always unfortunate, so we'll take a look at this and see what we can find out. I appreciate you bringing it to our attention. I do wonder, for example, whether screen recognition might be a temporary workaround.
It shouldn't let a company off the hook in terms of making sure the app is genuinely accessible, but if you've got something you need to do, worth a try, if you haven't done so already, but I imagine you have. So let's see if anyone else has any feedback, [email protected], if you want to be in touch.
And finally, Judy Dixon says, "Jonathan, I found your interview with MakeSense Technology and their Vector device very interesting. Since you've experienced this device, can you tell me how it handles drop-offs, curbs, stairs, and that sort of thing? This wasn't covered in the interview, and I am wondering if it is the device's Achilles' heel."
Judy, if you're coming to the NFB National Convention in July, hopefully you'll be able to put this through its paces and talk to the team about this, but my understanding would be it's not necessarily designed to help with those because you're still going to be using your white cane, and they did make it very clear that they don't perceive this to be a replacement for the cane.
So your cane is still going to give you the same clues it always has about when you're reaching drop-offs, curbs, that sort of thing. What it's good at is just steering you around things in a way that you don't even know that they're there. So it gives you a degree of fluidity that you might not get otherwise because your cane is constantly coming into contact with obstacles.
So let's see how this develops, and if you do get to play with it in the coming convention season, it'll be interesting to know what you think. That concludes this episode of Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. To send in a contribution for a future episode, email us, attach an audio clip, or just write it down and send it to [email protected].
That's [email protected]. To keep up to date with Access On, follow us on Mastodon, [email protected]. That's [email protected] on Mastodon. To subscribe to an announcement-only email list about upcoming episodes, send a blank message to [email protected]. That's [email protected].
To learn more about the National Federation of the Blind, visit our website, nfb.org, or phone us 410-659-9314. That's 410-659-9314. And be sure to check out the Nation's Blind Podcast right from where you heard this podcast.