There are steps that both students and instructors can take to make CarmenZoom meetings more accessible.
Recommendations for meeting hosts and instructors
- Students using assistive technology may experience issues with the Zoom CarmenCanvas integration. Instead of using the Canvas integration, instructors can manage meetings and recordings directly in the Zoom interface. Instructors can then share the meeting room link with students in Carmen. Students can then use the accessible Zoom Desktop Application to attend the Zoom meeting.
- Zoom’s Live Transcription option provides robot transcription services, which enables speech-to-text transcription during live Zoom Meetings and Zoom Webinars. Learn more about live transcriptions and under which circumstances their use is appropriate.
- Using cloud recordings, Zoom offers audio transcription to automatically transcribe the recorded audio in a meeting or webinar. To meet accessibility standards the automated transcriptions will need to be edited to remove errors. See the Manage CarmenZoom Cloud Recordings guide for more information.
- Hosts can support participants by informing them ahead of time of any specific features they plan to use during their meeting. E.g., breakout rooms, participant feedback buttons, and polls.
Recommendations for meeting attendees and students
- Both the Zoom application and CarmenZoom have unique characteristics that may take time to become familiar with. It is recommended that individual users experiment with both options and find the solution that works best for them. E.g., some users might prefer the browser based interface and how it responds to different assistive technologies, while others may prefer the shortcut keys provided with the application (Hot Keys and Keyboard Shortcuts).
- Zoom does a fairly good job of storing user preferences, but it is good to familiarize yourself with how to adjust key settings such as those within the audio and video submenu options; particularly as some menu items have labeling issues.
- As a Zoom meeting or webinar participant, if the host enables the automatic live transcriptions, you can turn on the captions and/or view the complete transcript.
- For non-mouse users, interacting with the various panels and windows can present barriers. In the web interface, open windows may prevent users from accessing the main toolbar so consider keeping those components merged on the page as panels. In contrast, in the software application, users can quickly move between windows using the F6 key which may make separate windows more appealing than merged panels.
- For screen reader users, note that buttons do not consistently indicate whether they function as a toggle, trigger a submenu, or launch a window or panel. Also, typically after triggering a menu button, focus remains on the button and no feedback is provided (e.g., the expanded state is not announced). Users should assume the menu has expanded and use the arrow keys to begin navigating the submenu options.
- For screen reader users, it may be necessary to manually toggle between navigation and interactive modes in order to understand the surrounding context of interactive elements.
- When using forms, note that required fields are not always indicated. Sometimes error messages are provided but do not receive focus consistently. Sometimes a disabled submit button is the only indication of an error.
Please contact us if you need additional support
- Email: carmenzoom@osu.edu
- Phone: 614-688-4357 (HELP)