The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has recently published the Note Accessibility of Remote Meetings.
The impact of COVID-19 has substantially increased the use of remote meeting platforms. With the rapid shift to remote meeting platforms, there has been little formalized guidance on how to ensure that remote meetings are accessible.
The Note is sectioned for different groups of audience and covers the need for remote meeting platforms to follow the accessibility standards in their development and ensure that content is accessible to all participants. Guidance includes making procurement decisions on a remote meeting platform, developing a remote meeting platform, sharing content during a meeting, ensuring that hosts and participants in remote meetings have accessibility features available and guidance on hybrid meetings along with remote meetings embedded into other tools such as conference and learning management platforms.
The Note was published by the Research Questions Task Force (RQTF) of the Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group. The development of the Note was led by CFA Australia CEO Dr Scott Hollier, who stated that “In developing this Note we aimed to find the best way to support different audiences in using remote meeting platforms while ensuring the guidance is linked back to the relevant W3C standards, where applicable. It’s great to see the Note released and I’d like to thank Judy Brewer, my RQTF colleagues and great public feedback in making this release possible.”