[NFB-Science] Work meetings using WebEx or Microsoft Teams

[John Miller]

Hello,

I sometimes participate in a meeting using Webex from the company Cisco.

My colleagues complete some webex information so that webex calls their phone at the meeting start time.

I, on the other hand, call in to the toll-free number or to a long distance number with my cell.

When you log-in to webex your name appears on the screen during the meeting.

Webex allows the host to share their desktop with the meeting's participants.

Usually an agenda powerpoint is presented during the meeting.

When you call in as I have been doing, you appear as "user?" where ? is a number.

Participants seem to like to know the list of current participants displayed within the webex application and it would be desirable if I could figure out the configuration so that my name was also listed during the call.



What is more important is that it is currently quite time-consuming for me to collect the call-in phone number and access code from a meeting invite.

>From a fresh meeting invite in Outlook 2016 I can readily find the information.

I prefer to accept meetings and move the meeting invites out of my inbox.

A large percentage of standing weekly meetings get cancelled.

A meeting might move to several time slots before it finally occurs.

So keeping all the invites in the inbox can be confusing.

A work-around might be to move a copy of a meeting invite into a subfolder but then to also place it on the calendar.

I do not know if Outlook 2016 supports this feature, though.



In some good news, when I go to calendar, I did just find the call-in information for a meeting yesterday afternoon.

It was in the body of the meeting description dialog box.

At this location was a brief agenda.

At the bottom past the agenda was a bewildering collection of nonuniform tables.

I could see it was a table because my braille display displayed "r1c1" or "r2c3" next to various pieces of information.

I used down-arrow to scroll through this information.

Eventually, I landed on the phone number and in a cell shortly thereafter the access code.

Doing a select all and paste into notepad preserved the agenda but did not copy the call-in information.

Is there a JAWS find mode that would quickly move me to the field I want inside Outlook calendar such as searching for "phone"?

Is there a JAWS jump to next table or move to next row command that works in this context?

The down-arrow got me there but I was browsing for 3-4 minutes to harvest the data.

Separately, where in JAWS is the configuration to shorten the default "display braille messages" time?

While I was verifying the phone number information a few minutes prior to the meeting, other team members decided to e-mail each other with several messages about team deliverables.

During the arrival of each e-mail, the braille display would freeze and stop displaying the phone number/access code I was reading and writing down in hardcopy.

Obviously I will be harvesting the call-in

information in future a good bit before the meeting begins to avoid this problem.



One work-around is that I have found each host has a phone number and access code that is constant across multiple meetings.

I am collecting this information in one file for ease of access so I will be ready to go for the next meeting called by a particular host.



I would like to hear about anyone's experience using Microsoft Teams for the host sharing the desktop and setting up a group audio call.

I would also be interested if anyone is able to contrive a fake meeting with a call-in number and no longer valid access code using webex.

I would be interested to hear from experts such as Curtis Chong or Steve Jacobsen if upon receiving such a meeting invite they were able to find an efficient way to collect the call-in information from Outlook 2016 calendar.

I would appreciate any thoughts about participating in scheduled work meetings.





Best Regards,

John