Distance meetings during the covid-19 pandemic: are video conferencing tools accessible for blind people?

Since the first lockdown in 2020, video conferencing tools have been becoming increasingly important for employment, education, and social interaction. This makes accessibility and usability of these tools essential. For instance, are the main functionalities fully accessible to all users? In this study we analyzed accessibility and usability by visually impaired people using screen readers and keyboard. This involved an inspection evaluation to test the most important features and a survey of visually impaired users to obtain information about the accessibility of three popular video conferencing tools: Zoom, Google Meet and MS Teams. The results showed that Zoom was preferred to Google Meet and MS Teams, but that none of the tools was fully accessible via keyboard and screen reader.