This is part two of the video conferencing accessibility guide. Part one of the guide goes through various technical and policy considerations for video conferencing accessibility. Check out part one of the guide here.

Evaluation of Common Video Conferencing Platforms for Accessibility

In this section, I will be evaluating common video conferencing platforms using the accessibility considerations discussed in the previous section. I will be focusing on technical considerations but may refer to some policy or settings considerations as relevant. Additionally, my focus will be on evaluating this from the perspective of a participant and not a host which introduces a bunch of other considerations. Finally, this evaluation is being done in November 2026 so I’m using the current versions of the various platforms and I am using the mobile apps on an iPhone Air. I am currently not able to use a desktop device and therefore my evaluation has been limited to mobile device but includes some knowledge from previously using several of these platforms on a laptop as well. Finally, I’m focussing on reviewing some condiment platforms but if there’s some I’ve missed that you’d like to see, feel free to contact me and I’ll try to review it. Also if you see any errors I’ve made I’d appreciate if you could let me know.

 Zoom

• Automated captions: available. Can be enabled by the participant.
• CART captions: interface available to embed
• Screen reader compatibility: mostly well labelled except for the menu item too mute the chat which is currently confusingly labelled show chat previews.
• Mobile device compatibility: mostly compatible
• Car mode availability: available and provides a large mute/unmute button
• Entering passwords and one click join links: most zoom meetings create a one click join link by default. Hosts must make sure to copy the one click join link rather than the one that requires the password to be shared with participants.
• Phone dial in options: available including one click join links for dialling in by phone
• Large text compatibility: the iPhone ap  has   inconsistent  compatibility with Large text.  the chat area seems to be compatible but when you sign into the app most of the Text there is a much smaller size and even some parts when you’re in a call or small. Most of  the app interface is icons and they tend to stay small and in some cases are not actually visible. For example, the hand raise icon seems to not be there at all and I only know it’s there because of using the screen reader to find it.
• Voice command compatibility: mostly well tagged except for the confusing label of show chat previews for the menu item that actually hides the chat.

Google Meet

• Automated captions: yes. Google Meet actually offered some of the most accurate Automated captions.
• CART captions: no interface for CART captions to be integrated into the video feed
• Screen reader compatibility: mostly compatible as far as I can tell.
• Mobile device compatibility: yes works well on mobile devices. However, on iPhone Google meet integrated into the Gmail app so if you are signed into a meeting, it can be kind of painful to also look up emails in Gmail if needed.
• Car mode availability: yes. It’s called on the go mode in Google meet and offers a large mute/unmute button and raise hand button as well.
• Entering passwords and one click join links: one click links available.
• Phone dial in options: available
• Large text compatibility: on iPhone the Large text settings flow through to the app. However, similar to zoom the icons remain small.
• Voice command compatibility: I did not test this extensively but as far as I can tell most things are well labelled for use with voice command

Microsoft Teams

• Automated captions: available
• CART captions:  interface available for integrated CART captions. I have not personally tried this but there is detailed information available in the Microsoft Teams help guide on setting this up.
• Screen reader compatibility: most things seem to be labelled correctly
• Mobile device compatibility: yes
• Car mode availability: as far as I can tell Microsoft teams does not have this available. I could not personally locate and googling this didn’t find any such mode either.
• Entering passwords and one click join links: one click join links available though actually logging into the meetings is sometimes non-obvious because it asks for name and sometimes other info in a confusing way
• Phone dial in options: available
• Large text compatibility: as far as I could tellThe iPhone appdid not carry over my large  text settings
• Voice command compatibility: most things seem to be labelled for Voice command but sometimes confusingly

 JITSI Meet

• Automated captions: no unless you run your own server and set it up to provide Automated captions
• CART captions: no an interface to integrate CART captains is not available
• Screen reader compatibility: this was a bit difficult to test as I couldn’t create a test meeting with just me in it using the iPhone app. On the main page thing seem to be labelled OK and when I’ve used this at meetings in the past it mostly seemed OK. Though some stuff on the main page like the list of meetings was not individually readable but only readable as one big block so it was difficult to select individual items or distinguish between individual items.also in the setting section, the slider buttons are all just labelled button. Probably there are other badly labelled parts of this app as well which I couldn’t test.
• Mobile device compatibility: yes to my experience some of the features are glitchy though it’s possible they’re also glitchy on desktop
• Car mode availability: yes. It provides a large mute/unmute button
• Entering passwords and one click join links: yes a one click join link is available
• Phone dial in options:
• Large text compatibility: the iPhone app mostly carries over settings for a large text. This app does have a fair amount of text and as far as I can tell it mostly appears to be the right size.
• Voice command compatibility: variable. Some things are tagged OK but for example in the setting section all the buttons are labelled button so that’s basically useless.

 Signal

• Automated captions:  not available
• CART captions:no integration available
• Screen reader compatibility:The screen reader compatibility for signal is inconsistent. the setup screen for video calls has several items that are not readable with the screen reader and the same is true once once joins the call. it’s regular messaging feature seems to be Screen reader compatible but the video call  feature is  not fully compatible.
• Mobile device compatibility: yes but in my experience this app was quite difficult to set up and I had to ask my Caregiver to help me because of all the secure keys and stuff like that that needed to be set up.
• Car mode availability: not available
• Entering passwords and one click join links: yes one click join links are available
• Phone dial in options: not available
• Large text compatibility: in theory yes. The settings do transfer over from iPhone settings though some buttons do end up falling off the screen depending on the exact size chosen. I had to change the accessibility settings on my phone to exclude this app from my accessible large text setting to make sure I was getting to actually interact with items on pop-ups etc.
• Voice command compatibility: similar to the screen reader compatibility, voice command compatibility for video calls on signal is inconsistent.some main items are tagged properly but the rest are missing tags entirely.

Gather/gather town

I’m including the platform here for a complete mess because more people are starting to use it. But I couldn’t actually evaluate this because it had the absolute worst iPhone app that I’ve seen of any video conference in platform in that the screen reader couldn’t read a thing. I think you have to like purposely designed it that way to achieve that level of bad. Usually badly coded apps in terms of screen reader compatibility we have a bunch of things labelled button for example or images might be labelled with strings with numbers and letters but there’s something. This app had absolutely nothing. My screen reader basically acted like this was a blank screen.