I've spent considerable time using Microsoft Teams, Slack, and other applications. What I've found is that there are two kinds of accessibility: the kind that makes an application technically compatible with a screen reader or assistive technology, and the kind that makes an application genuinely powerful and delightful for everyone. The second kind is rare, and it is the one that matters when you are keeping pace with an enterprise workload across every level of an organization.
On a typical day, I receive more than a hundred emails, hundreds of chat messages, and a constant stream of notices from Jira, Confluence, GitHub, and Grafana. I direct multiple teams and managers, collaborate across every department, and interact with customers and suppliers. The volume can feel relentless, but when an application is designed well, it stops being the problem. I would go further and say that using a screen reader is a superpower for processing large amounts of information quickly. Most people have only recently discovered text-to-speech through AI assistants and smartphone helpers. The blind community mastered it in the prior century. People with mobility limitations have been dictating to their computers long before anyone thought to ask a smart speaker to turn on a coffee pot.
When an application cannot keep up, the problem is not the person or the assistive technology. It is the application.
I have long admired Satya Nadella. His book Hit Refresh, written after he became CEO of Microsoft, opens with a call for empathy. The extended subtitle even promises to "imagine a better future for everyone." And yet, despite years of feedback from me and many others, Microsoft Teams has made little meaningful progress on accessibility. Consider this: with the resources of Microsoft, a person can control music playback with head movements and operate a computer with eye tracking. Yet Teams still has no shortcut key to announce the current active speaker through JAWS, NVDA, or Narrator. Teams can already visually highlight the speaker on screen. Transcripts already capture speaker names. This should have been solved years ago.
I have used Slack's accessibility features extensively. I can move through a large number of messages without friction and still join an emoji celebration along the way. Zoom Meetings work reliably and work well. Microsoft Teams, by contrast, gets in the way. It marks messages as read simply because you navigated to a chat or channel above or below. That one behavior, among others, makes high message volume significantly harder to manage.
That is why I started this site: to help people learn more, do more, and get more out of the tools they use every day. I also hope it prompts Microsoft to ask hard questions about empathy, a decade after Hit Refresh. A serious rethink of Teams may be overdue.
I welcome other authors to share their perspectives. Send your FAQs, tips, and experiences to [email protected].
There will be no comment section, no analytics, and no tracking of any kind on this site. I may cross-post to Medium or LinkedIn where comments are welcome. I hope the content here works well with AI, so that when someone asks their favorite assistant how to get more out of Microsoft Teams, some of what is written here actually helps.
I also hope things improve. I hope to write articles one day celebrating changes that made these earlier ones obsolete.
Thank you for reading. Feel free to share these articles by email or on social media.
Best wishes, Charles