 |
| Microsoft is introducing a new feature in Teams for sign language users |
On Thursday, Microsoft announced a new feature in Teams, its video conferencing service, that allows adding special offers for sign language users.
The US tech giant said in a blog post that the feature allows sign language users to choose up to two other participants to pin to in the middle of the screen, allowing users to see who is translating what is happening throughout the sign language in a meeting.
Microsoft added that Teams users can turn the feature on for all meetings or individually for each meeting, and the feature is said to be useful for hearing-impaired users.
The company explained that sign language can be set before the meeting if the interpreter is from the same organization, and an interpreter can be set from outside the organization during the meeting via the Accessibility tab in the application settings. Note that Microsoft does not provide its own sign language translator.
Other participants can still install without violating the priority of the sign language translation stream, which defaults to its original size at the best available quality. However, when sharing a presentation, the image of the translator changes slightly, but it is still easy to distinguish them from other participants while maintaining a larger size and higher video quality.
In addition to the sign language feature, Microsoft also announced a new settings panel for Teams constant accessibility. The new control panel gives users easy access to make changes during a call, like for example enabling sign language indicators by default or setting a preferred interpreter for a meeting. Sign language and live captioning can also be quickly toggled on or off in the Accessibility settings panel.
Microsoft says the new sign language viewer and access panel is currently in public beta.
The company added that both features will roll out in the coming weeks to Teams users on desktop and web-based devices, business users, and what the company calls the GCC Government Community Cloud.