A comparative study of disabled people's experiences with the video conferencing tools Zoom, MS Teams, Google Meet and Skype

Abstract

ABSTRACT The paper presents a comparative mixed methods study of the accessibility and usability for disabled people of four video conferencing tools, Zoom, MS Teams, Google Meet and Skype. Useable responses were obtained from 81 disabled people with diverse characteristics, mainly in the UK, though some groups had low representation. None of the tools was considered fully accessible and useable. Zoom was both the most commonly used and the most frequently preferred (56.1%) tool, with MS Teams second in usage and a trailing second in preferences (15.9%). It was considered to have better captioning, but otherwise to generally be a poor second to Zoom. Skype was the most commonly used before lockdown, but was considered dated and its limited use was mainly social, whereas the other tools were also used in work and education. The results were used to draw up separate lists of recommendations for developers and meeting organisers and hosts, as the study also identified actions for organisers and hosts to improve meeting accessibility. Developer recommendations include several easy to set customisation and user friendly interface features, involving disabled people and specific accessibility features, including compatibility with assistive technology, keyboard shortcuts for all functions and automatically-on high quality captions.