Hearing accessibility

- Statistically, one in six people have some form of hearing loss, and it's often a hidden disability. It's very common for people with hearing disabilities to cover at work. For some, that means sitting closer to the front of the room during a meeting, it may mean they were increasingly discreet hearing AIDS or use assistive technologies. In this video, I want to share tools that are made to support people with hearing disabilities. Before I go too far, I want to mention that when it comes to hearing and accessibility, it's important to recognize the differing needs of people who use sign language and those who use captioning or subtitles. Many people use both, but you should respect an individual's preference. Now a great place to start is with everyone's responsibility for inclusive video meetings. Here are a few top tips for success. First, encourage camera's on and opt for simple backgrounds or blurred background. Many people lip read. You make it much easier if people don't need to ask Next, offer captions or transcription or both. Even though the tools are there for people to turn captions on in apps like Teams, you might be using PowerPoint on a video platform that doesn't have captioning. Take a close look to see what your options are. My point here is that you should be inclusive and turn your PowerPoint captions on as standard practice. Trust me, people will take notice and maybe there'll be more inclusive the next time they present. Another great tip is to make sure to record your meetings as video. Every video saved to Microsoft Stream from Teams is auto captioned. Even if the meeting wasn't live captioned in the moment, attendees can go back to the meeting afterwards and access the video captions. People across your organization can go back and amend any inaccuracy in the text. Over time, your system gets more accurate as it learns your organization's specific vocabulary. And lastly, an important tip is to mute when you're not speaking and certainly avoid talking over one another. This isn't just great practice, it also supports caption accuracy and eliminates competing noise. Now, there is even more that you can do to support colleagues. I want to share a few specific user settings and tools that help people who are deaf and those with hearing loss. If you have a sign language interpreter, you can pin their feed in Microsoft Teams to ensure that they're always visible. You can also right click and fit to frame to see the whole person. Auto captions are available in so many places, such as video platforms like Teams or Google Meet, PowerPoint Present Live that you translate into 65 languages at the same time, and finally, there's Microsoft Translator. This really is your safety net, available in browser, on your smart watch, on your phone. As long as you can get online nowadays, you can get great auto captioning. Another great feature is notification delay. This could be set up on your Windows device to extend notification time. You can create very visible whole screen alerts. And finally, Windows supports adding VTT files to any type of video. Now, if you're not familiar with VTT this simply means a file that serves as the timestamped text captions for your video. With this functionality at your fingertips, there's really no reason why anyone shouldn't be including captions in their videos, on training collateral, and presentations, on employee meetings, or even on new business pitches. In your place of work, I strongly recommend you aim to get to a place where viewing non-captioned video just looked wrong. As an individual, I'd encourage you to ask for captioned video. They're so much easier and secure to produce than ever before. Everything I've shown you in this video is also helpful for people in noisy work environments, like construction sites, retail stores, or where people need silence, like libraries or theaters. Check out these awesome accessibility features and recommend them to anyone who you think could benefit from using them.