Making word clouds and polling fully accessible to all meeting attendees

If you want to be perceived as inclusive, you have to BE inclusive. Otherwise, your words and actions are merely performative.

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Let’s face it; Zoom meetings can be tedious. An entire business sector has popped up, focusing on making presentations more interactive by getting real-time feedback from the participants. Mentimeter is one such tool. That is the tool I am most familiar with, so I will use it as an example throughout this article because I have used these steps with Mentimeter, and I know they work. You could likely substitute a different polling or word cloud tool and use the same steps to make it more accessible.

There are three parts to any polling tool where accessibility matters:

• The authoring interface, where the individual sets up the poll.
• The voting interface, where participants cast their vote.
• The results interface, where voting…