Office of Accessibility Editor’s note: With the majority of state employees working from home most meetings are now online. This has provided a greater awareness of remote meeting tools and features, and the challenges that they may present for people with disabilities. The Office of Accessibility and Minnesota IT Services (MNIT) are working together on known issues with online meeting tools. For example, one product announces every chat message to participants using a screen reader. While this may seem like a good idea, it forces the user to hear both the event audio and chat audio at the same time. We have alerted the vendor to this issue, but until the issue is resolved, the Office of Accessibility tested several temporary workarounds. One approach is to have chat only go to those with specific roles, like the meeting organizer. We collaborated with a user who frequently uses chat in online meetings to test this process in a few meetings, and asked him to share some best practices to make your meetings more effective and inclusive. 

Managing chat in large online meetings: An experienced user's story

It can be hard to apply a best practice to a specific situation. I host online meetings often, sometimes multiple meetings in a day, and I frequently use the chat panel. As a host, I was faced with finding a way to share information quickly with all attendees. First, I used the following best practice from the Office of Accessibility to manage chat in meetings. 

Best Practice for Using Chat in Online Meetings

Tell participants how you will handle chat

Send an email to attendees before the meeting. Ask them to use chat only for communicating with the meeting host or a designated chat monitor. Remind attendees not to use the “everyone” option at the beginning of the meeting.

Get help

Ask a colleague or other meeting attendee to act as the designated chat monitor. Agree on roles in advance so everyone knows what to do. 

Have a process for getting a turn to speak

The host and the chat monitor can manage opportunities for people that want a turn to speak. They can also verbalize comments for those who prefer to type their communications. 

Have a process for sharing information

Share website URLs and files through alternate methods:

• When available before the meeting, share these and any meeting documents by email.
• If individual attendees need the file or URL during the meeting, share those in the chat with them directly. Do not share using a post that goes to “everyone.”

Follow Up

Send a summary of all information shared during the meeting by email after the meeting. This should include any websites or documents discussed.

Putting the best practice in play 

When I learned that every message coming into the chat panel is read out loud for those that use screen readers, I knew I needed to change how I run my meetings. Hearing all of that in addition to trying to focus on the content from the presenter would be overwhelming.

I worked with the MNIT Office of Accessibility (they are my digital accessibility coordinator) to test and come up with some best practices and workarounds that would accommodate everyone. Since I frequently use the chat panel in the meetings I host, I realized I was quite locked into my usual approach, so I appreciated the help.

How I typically use the chat panel

I typically use the chat panel when presenting about a product or process. I like to keep attendees engaged by asking them to enter their questions and comments in chat and sending it to everyone. This allows me to answer and react during natural pauses in the content. I think that works much better than allowing people to ask questions verbally, disrupting the flow. As I planned to limit the use of chat during my next meeting, I had two concerns:

1. How do attendees ask questions during a meeting if they aren’t able to use chat as they have been?
2. How will I keep them engaged by responding to them in real-time?

Planning for the workaround

Turns out, shifting gears wasn’t difficult. Here’s how we planned for it.

• Changing up the chat: We decided to send chat messages only to the host rather than to everyone. With this in place, there would be no more overlapping talking from presenter, and the screen reader.
• Recruiting a chat monitor: I’ve been very fortunate to have co-workers who have always helped me in meetings by moderating the chat. Now it was critical. First, we would make this person the meeting host so they were the one receiving the messages from the chat. Then, when I took a pause during the meeting, I could ask the chat monitor to relay a question or comment they received.  
• Allowing people to speak: Unlike prior sessions, we decided to ask attendees to unmute and ask their questions as well. For those comfortable trying the new raise hand function (we have not yet fully tested this for accessibility) they could try this option.
• Sharing information: One really useful thing about chat is the ability to share links to resources, files, etc. So instead of sharing them in the chat, the ones we would be referring to in the meeting would go into the meeting invitation.  For others mentioned during the meeting, we were prepared to send them out post-meeting.

Communicating the plan

Once we knew what to do, it was a matter of getting the word out to attendees.  We did this both before and during the meeting.

• In the meeting invitation we included three links to content we would be referring to during the presentation. We also outlined the expectations that chat would only be going to the host.  
• When the meeting started we reminded attendees of the links in the invitation and walked through using chat. I had prepared a PowerPoint with screen shots of the interface, with the chat drop down options. As I answered questions, I mentioned again that I wanted them to use chat to ask questions and provide feedback. I highlighted the difference for this meeting: these chats would now be sent only to the host.

Lessons learned

As always, a practice session before the meeting helped iron out some details. In particular, we figured out how to set chat to only go to the host, not everyone. Without our advance session, we may have missed that and our plan would not have worked as intended.

In our case, a post-meeting email was needed to share additional resources. We were ready for it; I kept notes about which ones to share, and we sent it within an hour of the end of the meeting.

Overall, it struck me was that this was a much more focused meeting than ones that allowed chat to everyone. Thinking back, we might have been expecting too much for any attendee to use chat and still be able to pay attention to the content I was presenting. We know that the vendor is working on a fix for this, but it’s made me consider that this might, in some cases, be a better approach to meetings moving forward.