Teams becomes user-friendly for people with hearing impairment

On March 6, Microsoft announced the availability of a new feature in Microsoft Teams meetings dubbed Closed Captions in PowerPoint Live. The feature is specifically designed to promote the inclusivity of users with hearing impairment by allowing them “to better understand the auditory content being shared”.

The feature will also come in handy in case you are joining the meeting while in a noisy space, have a problem processing auditory information, or if you’re not conversant with the language being used to communicate in the meeting.

You can easily catch up with the information being passed on during the meeting by enabling the closed captions feature. It should be noted that the video must also feature a closed captions file.

According to Microsoft:

PowerPoint users who are looking to create accessible presentations can easily add closed captions to any embedded PowerPoint video directly from within PowerPoint for Windows and macOS.

What’s more, once you’ve enabled this feature, the video closed captions will pop up at the bottom of the slide. The feature is individual-specific, this means if you have it enabled it will only be available for you and won’t affect other attendees.

In related news, Teams’ Schedule send suggestions feature also hit broad availability to further enhance communication, especially for users that work asynchronously across different time zones.