Microsoft has announced improvements to the accessibility functionality of Microsoft Teams and Outlook to help improve the inclusiveness of the workplace. Several of these features are aimed at improving the experience for “deaf and hard of hearing people and increase flexibility and focus for everyone.” Though, these features are useful for a far greater user base.
Microsoft has made these improvements throughout the Microsoft 365 cloud, including Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, and Viva. Here are some of the more notable changes Microsoft is releasing. For more details, see Microsoft’s post Creating inclusive hybrid work experiences – what’s new in Microsoft 365 accessibility features for Fall 2021
Support Employees’ mental health and wellness with Viva Insights
Microsoft states that “mental health conditions are the number one disability in the world today.” Viva can help users “achieve balance, collaborate intelligently, find greater focus, and be their best from wherever they work.” Viva Insights uses AI to improve work/life balance. The Protect Time experience helps block time on your calendar, so you have the time necessary to respond to messages and time to focus on work. There are improved Meditation options to increase calm. The new Virtual Commute experience helps you mentally close out the day by offloading tomorrow’s tasks.
Multiple improvements announced for accessibility in Outlook
Improvements to Outlook for Windows’ Editor tool will offer the user “refinements to improve clarity, conciseness, inclusiveness, and more.” Microsoft’s goal is to “give you more confidence as a writer and communicator.”
Dictation now supports more voice commands and automatic punctuation. With these improvements to dictation, you can add recipients, add text to the subject line of an email, and verbally give the command to send an email. By turning on auto-punctuation, you no longer need to verbally say how you would like to punctuate your sentences and can speak much more naturally. This is available in the Outlook app for Windows and Mac (as well as the Microsoft Word application).
“Accessibility Checker MailTip” will automatically prompt you when you’re including inaccessible content. These reminders make Outlook more accessible than ever before.
Teams improved with Live Captions, Live Transcription, CART support, and improvements to views
Captioning is not new to Microsoft Teams, but here are some interesting improvements. Once enabled by an administrator, users can turn on Live Captions that only they can see during the meeting. Captions are generated automatically using Microsoft’s AI technology and have been expanded by increasing the number of supported languages to 28 and including support for speaker attribution. This functionality is now available in both Teams meetings and Teams Live Events.
Live Transcription can convert the spoken word to written text and can be available both during and after the meeting has ended. Once the feature is enabled by an administrator, this transcription happens in near real-time and can start automatically when the meeting recording begins. It can also be enabled without recording the meeting.
Live Captions and Live Transcription can be very useful tools but do have some limitations when there is a lot of technical terminology or when speakers have multiple accents. To address these limitations, Microsoft is announcing CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) Captioning support for Teams. This is where a person is translating spoken word to text. This can be particularly useful in circumstances where translation/dictation software usually fails. To use this feature the user will receive a special link along with the meeting invite from the meeting organizer, which will connect them to their preferred CART captioner. The CART captioner will enter text in real time.
In the past, it has been challenging to view both a presentation and sign language interpreter on the screen simultaneously. Teams was limited to viewing one or the other. This is now changing in Microsoft Teams. Now you can spotlight or pin multiple videos at the same time. This can allow a user to view a sign language interpreter and a presentation screen on a video call. Pinning changes the view for the user only. Spotlighting is done by a presenter (or organizer) and allows them to highlight up to 7 different feeds which are displayed to all attendees.
