By Jennie Delisi and Kris Schulze 

Microsoft Teams has features you can use to ensure everyone on your team can access your posts. The features are available for files, chats, and meetings. Use the digital accessibility basics you already know. For example, use meaningful text for links and headings. Format your posts as you would when drafting emails and documents.

New features are being released all the time. Check the Microsoft’s Accessibility overview of Microsoft Teams page regularly for the most recent information and newest accessibility improvements. Fun fact: While writing this article, the authors learned tips and tricks from each other! There is always more to learn.

Communicating with Accessibility in Mind

There are two key factors to digital accessibility when using Teams:

• Plan with accessibility in mind.
• Know the features and how to use them.

While the following list  may seem a bit overwhelming, try learning a few each week.

Status indicators 

Many people check your status indicator to determine if you are available for a chat. Others use the status indicator to communicate to others that they need to focus on a meeting or task. This may be true for people with cognitive disabilities such as those that have had a brain injury. We can support our colleagues by respecting their status indicators.

Ways to update your status indicator

• Update your status from your Profile or from the Search (type a command box). Type /away, /busy, /dnd, /brb, or /available to set your status as Away, Busy, Do not disturb, Be right back, or Available.  
  
• If you have both Skype and Teams, you may need to set these presence indicators separately.

Naming Your Teams 

Name your team knowing that some people will have a lot of them. 

• Use short, meaningful team names. It may be difficult for some to find a specific team when navigating within Teams. This difficulty increases as they join more teams. 

Meaningful link text 

To add text to a link in chats or channel posts:

• Select Format. The icon for Format is the letter "A" with a paintbrush, located below the message body.
• Then, select Insert link. An alternate way to do this: select/highlight the display text, use CTRL + K to open the Insert link dialog box. 

Gifs and Emojis 

Select gifs and emojis carefully. Animations can cause issues for some users when there is no way to pause, stop, or hide them. A team owner can set if they want to allow animated emojis and gifs. If you have challenges with animations, send the team owner a note asking them to turn this off for the team (Manage Team > Settings > Fun Stuff). Learn more about accessible communications with emojis and emoticons in our article, Say It With A Face.

Mentions Get Attention 

To get someone’s attention, “@Mention” them using @ and the person’s name. This adds an alert into the activity feed and makes it easier for the person to notice that you want them to review something. It also helps them find the information specific to them when they review longer posts and chats.

Format and Organize Your Posts 

Format your posts to keep conversations organized and easy to spot in channels: 

• Always use a subject line when starting a channel post. This makes it easier for people to follow conversations and track steps they need to complete. Think of this like the subject line of an email. 
  • Select Format. The icon for Format is the letter "A" with a paintbrush, located below the message body. 
  • Text editing options will become available, including a prompt to “Add a subject.”
  • Use either Alt+Tab or the mouse to move up to add the subject. 
• When replying to a post on the same topic use the “reply” option, instead of “Start a new conversation.” This will keep the group together. 
• Use structure in posts, especially longer ones. 
  • Use the format button beneath the post text field to open more text editing options (or use CTRL + SHIFT + X). 
  • Just like in documents, you can use styles (e.g. heading levels), bulleted and numbered lists.

Name your documents carefully 

Long lists of documents in Teams Files make it difficult to determine which one you need, even when sorted. Imagine the file name as the meaningful text for a link. Will it tell you which file will open?

Use a Profile Photo 

Profile photos help people identify which person shared a post. It also helps them know who is speaking during a meeting. 

Use Accessible Templates 

Have accessible, branded templates? Use them. Start in your desktop and save the document to the channel. Instructions are in the Tech Tip of the June 2020 Office of Accessibility newsletter.

Accessibility Features for Yourself 

Keyboard Shortcuts  

Keyboard shortcuts are available for Microsoft Teams. To find them within Teams there are several options:

1. In the search bar, type "Keys”.
2. Type CTRL+Period (.) from anywhere within Teams Desktop or Web apps.
3. Select your Profile icon, which may announce to screen reader users as “Profile, App Settings, and more.” Open the drop-down menu, and select Keyboard shortcuts. 

Manage Your Alerts 

Mute a chat 

When you mute a chat, you're still included in the chat, you just won't get notifications from it. 

• Select Chat to open the chat list.  
• Find the name of the chat you want to mute.  
• Select More options ellipses and then select Mute.  
• If you change your mind, just select it again to unmute. 

Adjust your notifications 

• Select Profile > Settings or use the shortcut Ctrl+Comma (,).  
• Open Notifications to set the type of notifications you want for each type of activity.  

Use “Do Not Disturb” 

• Select your Profile icon, which may announce to screen reader users as “Profile, App Settings, and more.”  
• Open the drop-down menu, and select Do Not Disturb. 

More options for setting this status are listed earlier in this article, in “Status Indicators.” 

Choose Your Level of Contrast 

Changing your color contrast/ themes may help people that: 

• Have migraines or  
• Find that having a variety of color themes on their screen helps them focus. 

To change your theme: 

• Select your Profile icon, which may announce to screen reader users as “Profile, App Settings, and more.” Or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Comma (,). 
• Open the drop-down menu, and select Settings > General.  
• In the Theme section, select from High contrast or Dark or Default themes. You will need to set this for both the Teams Desktop and Web apps. 

Using a Screen Reader 

Microsoft has help pages for those using a screen reader. A good starting place is Basic tasks using a screen reader with Microsoft Teams. 

Using Magnification

For those that need to zoom in to better see content, Microsoft has instructions on how to Zoom in and out of Teams. 

Using Read Aloud Options 

Having information like posts and documents read aloud to you can help with editing. At this time, for those in the Government Community Cloud, this option is not yet available for Microsoft Teams Desktop or Web apps. A workaround is to open Teams in Microsoft Edge, and use Read Aloud in Edge.

Meeting Accessibility 

Our previous blog articles address meeting accessibility: 

• Remote Meeting Guide. 
• Accessible Remote Meetings. 

Using a Sign Language Interpreter in a Meeting  

To keep focus on the sign language interpreter’s video during a meeting you can “pin” their video.  

• Navigate to the person’s video. 
• Right click (Shift + F10) and select Pin. 

If someone is also trying to share content, you won’t be able to pin both shared content and someone’s video. A workaround is to also join the meeting on the Teams Web app using Edge or Chrome.  

• View the shared content using the web app. 
• Keep the interpreter’s video pinned on your desktop app.  

Note: You may want to right click on the web tab to Mute the tab so that audio isn’t coming from both the web browser and desktop app.   

View Automatically Generated Captions in a Teams Meeting 

Automatically generated captions, called “live captions” in Teams, are available during Teams Meetings. While not as accurate as having a professional caption writer, there are times where this feature may help during a meeting. 

To try out this option: 

• Go to the More options/ellipses on the Meeting Control Bar. 
• Select “Turn on live captions.” 

Captions for Meetings 

While auto captions are a great feature, they are not a substitute for having a professional caption writer. Captions by a “CART writer” will have greater accuracy. If you are providing captions using CART, you will need to provide access to this through a separate web page option. At this time, there is not a way to integrate or replace the auto-captions in Teams Meetings or Teams Live Events.