Seemingly overnight, the COVID era also became the age of the Zoom meeting. But how does that work out for the deaf and hard of hearing? The answer has been, Not very well. For example, you might start out with the image of a signed-language interpreter beside the speaker, but in the blink of an eye that interpreter might languish on the last row of faces.

Recently Zoom made improvements that allow ALS-reliant users to keep interpreters visible on the screen. Get a detailed description of how to make Zoom work better for the deaf and hard of hearing in this article from Mashable, Zoom catches up with new accessibility features for sign language interpretation.

Of course Zoom isn’t the only option.

Mashable reporter Sasha Lekach observes that Cisco offers a solid menu of accessibility features baked into its WebEx product. Skype and Google Meet provide transcription and real-time closed captioning to give a boost to deaf and hard of hearing users.