Web Conferencing Blog

We talk about usability a lot, but what if you have trouble seeing what’s on the screen or can’t see it at all? Some vendors state that their solutions offer optimized usability for the visually impaired. That is all good and nice, but before verifying those claims, we took a step back to have a look at the big picture.

First of all we checked for how many potential users this issue poses a difficulty. According to USA today and the AFB (American Foundation for the Blind) there are 10 million visually impaired people living in the US, 1.3 million of whom are legally blind. Within that group you can further discern those who are most likely to ever use a web conferencing solution, i.e. the 2-3 million people who are working age. That makes 0,7% of the total US population.

Naturally, no matter how small that group is, they may not be disregarded. Accessibility policies vary from country to country, but most countries – including EU-countries – have adopted standards in accordance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to establish a minimum level of accessibility.

Our testing team sees two options of making an online meeting accessible to the visually impaired. One option are screen readers or magnification devices. Regarding the screen readers we are not too sure how vendors would implement them, considering that during an online meeting screens are shared, and the reader would thus have to be able to recognize the content on another attendee’s desktop. The user interface could also be optimized as far as font and button size is concerned, or the arrangement of items together with colors.

So there really are many questions attached to this topic. It would be interesting for us to hear about experiences and usage scenarios. So if you have any info for us please let us know, since we are anxious to learn more on this topic.

Range and number of functionalities are top priorities for most vendors of online collaboration tools, sometimes without taking into consideration whether all those functionalities offered are really needed and make sense.

Talking communities’ top priority is inclusion, making web conferencing technology available for everyone. The tool can be used without broadband and offers a variety of interface languages for participants from all over the world. A text-to-speech functionality as well as various settings for size and color of texts also make the tool an option for the visually impaired.

The tool does have its limitations, though. It only runs on Windows, thus excluding all Mac-users… And it seems as though desktop-sharing was also not possible.

Still we think this is a refreshing approach to online collaboration. Since the initial aim of the tool differs greatly from that of the other tools in our ranking, a comparison is not possible. But you can find out more about talking communities in a comparative study conducted by the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign.