Accessibility Agony Aunt

Everyone needs a little help sometimes, especially when it comes to assistive technologies.

We receive dozens of questions each week from users asking how to solve problems. Sometimes, people are worried about asking for help because they feel like they should already know the answer, but most of the time, you are not the only one who wants to know how to do something. That’s why each week we will choose a few of the best, most common, or simply the most interesting questions we get asked and share them here along with the answers.

If you need a hand with your assistive tech, whether it is a screen reader, magnifier, speech to text system, mind mapping tool or anything else, you can ask the Assistive Tech Agony Aunt for help.

Reducing Verbosity of New Teams Notifications

Accessibility Agony Aunt

Question:

With so many organisations moving from Classic Teams to New Teams, many users have been finding that although similar, the two versions are far from exactly the same. We have been contacted by a number of screen reader users who are finding the incoming chat notifications far too verbose and distracting in the New Teams asking if it is possible to reduce the verbosity. So, the question is: How do you reduce the verbosity without losing any of the key information such as the name of the sender and their message content?

Accessibility Agony Aunt #4

Katherine Turner

In the fourth instalment of the Accessibility Agony Aunt, we look at an issue where JAWS appears to stop reading a document in Word and subsequently crashes the application.

Accessibility Agony Aunt #3

Katherine Turner

In the third instalment of the Accessibility Agony Aunt, we look at a feature in Office that may have appeared without your knowledge, the Paste formatting menu.

Accessibility Agony Aunt #2

Kelvin Duncan

In this week’s Accessibility Agony Aunt, we look at the use of emojis in workplace emails and messages and how to use these in an accessible way.

Accessibility Agony Aunt #1

Olly Anthony

For our first Accessibility Agony Aunt, we answer questions about JAWS crashing and how to effectively navigate the ribbon menu in Microsoft Outlook.