Battle to be the best video conferencing The platform in the game is hotter than ever, and with more companies adopting Hybrid work Policies, companies like Microsoft regularly update their offerings to attract more users.
Accessibility at the cutting edge Microsoft Teams The update, which will soon introduce improved support for sign language communication.
Restriction on the company road map (Opens in a new tab)where it announces upcoming features, reads “Always display sign language and annotations in meetings.”
Sign language in Teams
According to the description, users will be able to “prioritize up to two videos of other sign language participants in meetings to remain visible even while content is being shared and set captions to remain in all meetings.”
Since the supported platforms are desktop and Mac, the new feature is not likely to work on mobile devices this time around. This may be due to the smaller screen size limitation, but we can’t rule it out for a future addition as the company realizes its importance.
Extended support for always-on sign language and annotations is scheduled to begin rolling out in December 2022.
This isn’t the only update coming to Teams this side of Christmas, with a whole host of additions and improvements in the pipeline.
In November, Microsoft set to expand emoji reactions in Teams chat messages to more than 800 emoji. Also set for the November release is a new scheduling tool that will prevent overzealous workers and night owls from annoying colleagues by sending out-of-hours messages. Messages will be available to desktop users, and soon you will be able to schedule messages to be sent at a specific time.
Some forms of sign language translation are already available for Zoom Users who can see an additional popup for up to 20 specific interpreters.