continue to participate in virtual calls.
SCENARIO 10 – NEW JOINER ENCOUNTERED DIFFICULTIES HEARING ALL PARTIES DURING IN-PERSON MEETINGS The customer was a new joiner, and in-person meetings comprised almost one hundred percent of their role. They mentioned being hard-of-hearing and said the number of speakers (and the fast pace) of each meeting made it difficult to follow (and understand the content). The customer found themselves taking extra time with notetaking and review afterwards (compared to their peers) and were concerned this would affect their job standing. • Software portion of the solution - Within EY, Microsoft Teams is the preferred virtual platform for meetings. Even though these meetings were in-person, the AT team found that an individual can set up and join a Teams meeting on their own (without any other participants). It was found that Teams Captioning could still be activated (even when a meeting only had one participant). • Hardware contribution to the solution – Even though the individual could use Teams Captioning during the in-person meeting, the built-in microphone on their laptop was insufficient to pick up all voices in the room. The AT team recommended an external Bluetooth speaker/microphone that could be placed anywhere in the room. • Combining hardware & software – The customer could place the Bluetooth unit in an optimal location without attracting attention. Within Teams, they set the audio input (microphone) to be the Bluetooth unit. Once these settings were ready to go, the customer started their Teams meeting (where they were the only participant) and activated captioning. • End Result – The combination of a single-participant Teams meeting, the Bluetooth speaker/microphone, and activating Teams Captioning allowed the customer to follow the spoken words from everyone in the meeting! While speaker attribution was unavailable (since only one person joined the Teams meeting), Teams did separate the spoken words from different users (for those inevitable times when people spoke over each other). The ten scenarios listed in this paper are only a small sample of the types of cases the AT team at EY works with daily. Readers may have different ideas for solutions, given the high diversity of thought in the AT field. It is hoped that the ideas in this paper will be beneficial when readers encounter similar situations.
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