Video conference app world tour Election observer edition.

 RantWoman has been known to live-tweet in-person meetings of the Citizens Telecommunications Advisory Board. But in the age of video conferencing, RantWoman's first task is...join the meeting.

The platform: Webex! 

(RantWoman knows someone who does corporate consulting for a company that relies on Webex so RantWoman will pass along anything she hears.

Can you find the
festive holiday string of lights?
It's pandemic holiday

RantWoman has successfully joined a Webex meeting from an app downloaded to a machine running JAWS at The Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing . But apparently, something has gotten upgraded. RantWoman has now had trouble joining two different meetings. 

The first problem meeting, RantWoman had some weird browser issue trying the mandatory test for compatible media players. The second time RantWoman is not sure what the problem was except maybe RantWoman should have tried less visual and more screen reader.

 

If RantWoman had her act fully together, she would arrange in advance for a practice session. RantWoman is a last-minute girl though. When frustration strikes on the PC, RantWoman just bails and uses her Android phone with Talkback. 

This is less than optimal. 

For one thing, Large screen on the PC. RantWoman can actually see faces in a way that would be indecently close in real life

No obvious captioning. What? Read the documentation to see how this might be handled? Ummmm? Ditto for ASL interpretation. Never Mind. RantWoman does not need either feature; it's just that a couple days ago she was on a Zoom webinar with an ASL Interpreter, a protactile interpreter, a certified deaf interpreter, captioning, and a request to adjust so someone could lipread the person voicing ASL.  There was also spoken Spanish though no one requested the option of lipreading the Spanish interpreter

Unlike Zoom, webex default with Talkback is a voice every time the speaker changers identifying the speaker. RantWoman has mixed feelings about this feature: RantWoman likes the Zoom option of announcements on touch on some devices. It actually would be nice to have an audio cue of who is speaking in Zoom, but RantWoman finds the Webex announcements annoying. This may partly be the default voice.

But on to the agenda. It's election night for the President and vice President for 2021. There are no hyperventilating emails announcing that "Mitch McConnell Exploded" or "Lindsay Graham is furious" or "Stacey Abrams is terrified." There was a description of the voting procedure, in this case send a private chat to the designated neutral observer. 

Thoughtful speeches. Uncontested races. Unanimous votes. Nothing even to try to overturn. Now rantWoman will resume eating her salad.

Next agenda items: end of year summaries. Eek. Screenshare! Wait: did the voice try to read it???? Oops. That's the chat. Hmm. RantWoman can find the chat but not read past chats. And how does one turn of the voice notifications? Oops. Figured out how to read others' posts to chat. 

And just like that the newly-elected chair adjourns the meeting. Happy holidays y'all!

PS for anyone who needs to sing the year out the door, from the Russian band DDT

20202 according to DDT 

No RantWoman has not fully parsed the lyrics, but if you need a brief explanation of the band's name--and another 2020 election story, put DDT into the search bar.