Note by @fastfinge

Andre Louis @FreakyFwoof@universeodon.com

I just had a genuinely visceral reaction to an article titled 'Switching to Microsoft Teams is getting a lot easier'
I shouted allowed, 'No!!!' Just like that.
You ever been on a plane when some little shittington brat is kicking the back of your seat and you turn around to the parent and just give them the look of... 'Sort it out?'
That's how the title of that aarticle made me feel internally.

I could think of very few things I'd like to do do less honestly.
Teams is a parasite on software society and should be canned last week. Dead. Gone. Buried more impressively than those Atari games in the desert.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@FreakyFwoof It's better than it used to be. And zoom is worse than it used to be. I suspect at some point they'll intersect and everything will suck.

Andre Louis @FreakyFwoof@universeodon.com

@fastfinge What happens with zoom for you? At least on Mac, it doesn't ever cause me any problems. I can have 10 flawless zoom calls in a row and 0 flawless teams calls. It has never once happened to me. As in, literally never.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@FreakyFwoof Access to stuff like in-meeting chat and files has been slowly getting more and more awkward on Zoom. The calendar synchronization sometimes just quits for no reason. Sometimes sending calendar invites aren't sent with the settings you configured for them. Sometimes pre-meeting notifications just don't happen. Raise hand and other interactions often don't get read out. Sometimes the recording and AI disclaimers don't get screen reader focus. The same happens to poles sometimes. Especially on mac, sometimes sharing audio from a screen share just breaks for no reason. Where I work, we use Zoom for everything (meetings, corporate chat, files, whiteboards, documents, notes, contact and calendar management, the phone system), so I'm often in five or six hours of Zoom meetings a day. The meeting quality itself has stayed excellent. But it's all the other things around it on Zoom that are slowly getting worse. And it's those same things that are slowly improving on Teams.

Andre Louis @FreakyFwoof@universeodon.com

@fastfinge Aah, I confess I don't share audio like that, I do so via mixer, and never have used the calendar integrations etc. I just get my students to enable the original sound and stereo options, and I turn on the AI summaries which is actually most excellent. Much less than you use it I guess, though I do have several meetings a week.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@FreakyFwoof Yes, AI summaries are amazing. We have Zoom's sales management thing, so I can actually get insights across multiple meetings. Wonderful when I'm meeting with two or three different teams about the same project.

Matthew J @bermudianbrit@mastodon.online

@fastfinge @FreakyFwoof ah yes. meeting summaries. A fantastic thing...until the client leaves the meeting and the remaining people bitch about how unreasonable and moronic the client is in the same call...only for a client to be emailed a beautifully presented summary of their thoughts. Yep yep...never seen that happen. no sir.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@bermudianbrit @FreakyFwoof There's a setting in Zoom to only send each person the summary of the parts of the meeting they were there for.

Matthew J @bermudianbrit@mastodon.online

@fastfinge @FreakyFwoof well. I don't think Teams has/had such a setting...or at least. I can confirm that several rather senior partners at the firm I work at...didn't know about it if it did

James H @quanin@allovertheplace.ca

@fastfinge @FreakyFwoof Someone should repeatedly tap Zoom on the shoulder for an accessibility audit until they submit. Though I, personally, haven't seen this behaviour so it may be a YMMV situation.

Andre Louis @FreakyFwoof@universeodon.com

@quanin @fastfinge I still rather give zoom my money than MS though. I just can't even.

James H @quanin@allovertheplace.ca

@FreakyFwoof @fastfinge To be fair, I'd rather give anyone my money than MS if that money would otherwise be going to Teams.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@quanin @FreakyFwoof It is. Things work on one machine fine, and don't work on another one. And both machines are identical hardware created from a corporate image. I dunno. I think it's because Zoom created their own accessibility stack instead of using a library like AccessKit, so the way they implement the API's isn't battle-tested the way it is for other apps.

James Scholes @jscholes@dragonscave.space

@FreakyFwoof Zoom's accessibility seems to deteriorate little by little with every update. The awful web-based calendar, new controls cluttering up the tab order, focus getting lost, buttons losing context in their labels, having to tab to the "Entire screen" option when sharing instead of Enter triggering it as the default as it used to, the chat UI which was never very good but is now worse...

As yet, none of it is enough to take away from the fact that it just works for joining meetings. I never have significant issues actually joining or taking part, but there may come a day when the reliability of the underlying service doesn't matter because using the app is so slow.

@fastfinge

James Scholes @jscholes@dragonscave.space

@FreakyFwoof Of all of those, the screen sharing flow thing trips me up the most. A number of times I've gone to share my screen, only for someone to speak up and say it hasn't happened because I'm used to pressing Alt+S followed by Enter which no longer works. Now it's Alt+S, Tab Tab Tab, Enter. Same UI, almost three times the keystrokes with no benefit. @fastfinge

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jscholes @FreakyFwoof Also there are some tab traps. Sometimes you can't get to stuff like the close participants button and have to just tab around that dialogue forever.

James Scholes @jscholes@dragonscave.space

@fastfinge Right. Sometimes Alt+U works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes Escape, sometimes not. @FreakyFwoof

Jamie Teh @jcsteh@aus.social

@FreakyFwoof @fastfinge @jscholes I'm starting to hate Zoom with a passion. I guess it's fine if you're just talking, but if you need to do anything else - text chat, reactions, breakout rooms, sharing, whatever - it's just deeply painful to use. Text chat is by far the worst though. It may be slightly better on Mac than it is on Windows. On Windows, they can't even be bothered implementing proper editable text accessibility, so I basically have to type my chat messages in the Run dialog and paste them into Zoom.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jcsteh @jscholes @FreakyFwoof I actually find it slightly better to navigate on Windows. Mac gets deeply confused by the channel list that should really be a treeview sometimes.

Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

@jcsteh @FreakyFwoof @fastfinge @jscholes The entire chat panel also lags for no good reason, to the point that hitting tab sometimes takes up to two seconds before NVDA reads what I focused on.

Yadiel Sotomayor @ysotomayor@mastodon.social

@TheQuinbox @jcsteh @FreakyFwoof @fastfinge @jscholes We use teams at the agency I work at and it works well for the most part. Especially chat and calls. Is it easy to use? Hell no., but it is accessible and works

Jamie Teh @jcsteh@aus.social

@ysotomayor @TheQuinbox @FreakyFwoof @fastfinge @jscholes Unpopular opinion: I find Google Meet to be least painful for me. Still hardly perfect, though.

Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

@jcsteh @ysotomayor @FreakyFwoof @fastfinge @jscholes Not an unpopular opinion as far as I'm concerned, all of these platforms are basically shit sandwiches served to us on golden platters, but Google meet is the least painful.

Jamie Teh @jcsteh@aus.social

@TheQuinbox LOL, that sounds like an analogy for most tech in 2025 in general. @ysotomayor @FreakyFwoof @fastfinge @jscholes

Justin Yarbrough @jyarbrough@dragonscave.space

@TheQuinbox @jcsteh @ysotomayor @FreakyFwoof @fastfinge @jscholes Yeah, I use Google Meet for personal stuff since it works decently well and I don't bump up against time limits with my paid Google account. Teams is pretty decent once you get the hang of it, though. It's what we use at work.

James Scholes @jscholes@dragonscave.space

@jyarbrough To be honest, having to "get the hang of it" is what I object to. I'm sick of every app that let's me send and receive messages and talk to people through a microphone imposing a disproportionate learning curve. @TheQuinbox @jcsteh @ysotomayor @FreakyFwoof @fastfinge

Martin @mcourcel@allovertheplace.ca

@jcsteh @FreakyFwoof @fastfinge @jscholes Zoom is a poop show.

Andre Louis @FreakyFwoof@universeodon.com

@jscholes @fastfinge On Mac at least, i can tell my students do CMD+Shift+S, once they enable share sound, immediately press enter and that works. Can't speak for windows.