Accessibility of remote meeting tools

Miro is a collaborative online whiteboard platform designed for remote teams. My colleagues trialled it for some of our disability awareness training activities before finding alternative solutions through Microsoft Teams, which seem to function equally well.

Accessibility features

Miro offers switch access, which provides an alternative to the touchscreen enabling the user to use a switch, a keyboard or a mouse to navigate around the board.

Challenges and improvements needed

From the perspective of a visually impaired user with some residual sight, Miro boards is not great. Early on in the lockdown I had a bad experience when, as we split out into different rooms, and I found myself left out of discussions with the team I was in, with no idea how to get into the room I was supposed to be in. I learned in a later session that it is possible to piggy-back onto another user and therefore be led by them around the interactive board, which made it much easier to follow.

With limited sight it would be very challenging to solely facilitate sessions on a Miro Board particularly when trying to perform specific tasks (including reading back sticky notes posted by a team in a specific area of the board). It is possible to create new sticky notes within an area of the board and to type into them using keyboard commands and so to participate in the session. Visual information within the boards is not screen reader friendly and there are no high contrast options available for those with colour blindness or other visual impairments. It will be great when the sticky notes can recognise and convert writing to typed text and then become screen reader friendly.

Slido is an easy to use Q&A and polling platform. It helps people to get the most out of meetings and events by bridging the gap between speakers and their audiences during events, enabling participants to ask questions and take part in audience votes and polls.

Slido works well with a screen reader with all functions being accessible including when creating and participating in polls. In addition, you can use the screen reader to navigate questions and participate in polls using keyboard shortcuts.

As well as participating in polls, Slido is accessible with the results, enabling you to upload them directly to a PowerPoint presentation from which means they can be read by a screen reader which will also highlight the most popular results.

Mentimeter is an easy-to-use presentation software which enables the user to create fun and interactive presentations.

As a tool, it helps by gathering live visual feedback from audiences and enables meeting participants to contribute in a way that they wouldn’t be able to do face-to-face.

Mentimeter is very much a visual tool and although you can participate in the surveys using a screen reader, the screen reader does not announce the results as they update in your presentation. The screen reader just picks up on the images rather than the details contained within the images unless the presenter has provided alternative text. It is therefore advisable to consider the content of your polls and to carefully explain the results within your discussions. By doing this you can adapt the accessibility of the feedback.