I’ve been part of a lot of conversations lately around digital accessibility. Part of this is because, during lockdown Microsoft made a major play to certain kinds of organisations, especially higher education institutions with certain kinds of management cultures, to be their software package of choice for ALL things. This has led to a very sudden shift to Microsoft Teams. I didn’t notice this when it happened, because the transition happened in administrative support across the university before it started to creep about a year later into reshaping interactions among academic staff. But by this time, policies had been developed around enforcing use of the platform, and exclusive use of that platform for “University business”. It has been weirdly difficult to problematise this as responses are quite binary: people either (1) “get it,” that is feel these problems deep in their psyche the moment they start using the tools, or (2) people are unaffected and quite skeptical about anyone who raises issues about Microsoft UX digital accessibility. This isn’t unusual for matters of accessibility which can be quickly invisibilised. It doesn’t help that Microsoft has made a pretty strong attempt to ND-wash their work by proactively asserting that it *is* accessible based on their comprehensive(TM) consultation of autistic and ADHD people.

My presentation this past summer marked an attempt to frame out my protest on the level of critical theory.

Since then, I’ve been involved in more practical discussions about what is going on here. Part of my anxiety relates to the way that the tool is meant to mobilise more stringent workplace surveillance as part of “performance management”. For those who haven’t yet been looped in on this concern:

(excerpt: “Your employer can monitor what you’re doing within Teams. They can also log conversations, record calls, and track your camera when you’re in a meeting. But there are also things they cannot do…”)

https://www.guidingtech.com/can-microsoft-teams-be-used-to-spy-on-you/

(excerpt: “Everything from how many meetings that user organized to how many urgent messages they sent is recorded. Separate numbers are given for scheduled meetings and those that were ad hoc. Even individuals’ screen-share time is there… Microsoft is measuring privacy settings, device types, time stamps, reasons why someone may have been blocked, and “the number of messages a user posted in a private chat.”

https://www.zdnet.com/article/i-looked-at-all-the-ways-microsoft-teams-tracks-users-and-my-head-is-spinning/

Discussion of this by various remote workers here:

Could my boss be using teams for surveillance? To what extent is it possible?
byu/ParmyBarmy inMicrosoftTeams

I had a few thoughts this week on the matter from a more practical level which I wanted to get down here:

1. I think it’s important to start by opening up the categories a bit, e.g. between the tech we DO use and the tech we WANT to use. So far arguments I’ve heard in favour of using teams (from sympathetic allies) have never rested on a claim that it is a nice / good tool that people actually want to use. The vibe seems to be, this is the thing I have to use, and because inertia / flow I would rather just use one thing please. I totally understand this! But it troubles me a little bit because we’re going with the flow and further consolidating the hold this social communication tool has on our life as a community because we’re too tired to fight it.
2. I do also think that some of us are exposed in different ways to the downsides of Teams. I know a few people might not worry about surveillance because (a) they are happy to be bold and loud about their radical action (me!) or (b) because they’re already surveilled all the time and it doesn’t matter. But some (disabled) others will find the levels of surveillance and enforcement psychologically unmanageable.
3. Or some people aren’t really affected by the visual clutter and bad UX choices around “noise” in teams which makes it hard to find information, or to silence unwanted notifications. I know this stuff hits me HARD and some other people are relatively unaffected. Like, I sometimes find that the inability to curate notifications in teams can make me feel panic and that is disabling – there is stuff coming in from lots of different directions and I can’t turn off messages from my HoS or some other team I’ve been drawn into but didn’t want to join. At least for my kind of autism, this is kryptonite. I can’t find things, and I can’t focus the stream of information, and these are mutually reinforcing bad things. And Microsoft has made the tool impossible to customise BECAUSE this gives managers and executives the ability to control the flow of information you receive, and this is a USP for the product.
4. So it’s a bad tool, but only some of us feel those consequences at levels which are disabling.
5. But also, teams is embedded in a structural problem, that is, it’s controlled utterly by people who do not consult end users on their product aquisition choices and do not have feedback mechanisms which are tied to authentic willingness to make adaptations. And to get changes made we need to convince those people (who are already skeptical) who aren’t interested in consulting us before they roll out products and policy changes.
6. So part of my resistance to this tool lies in a political or organisational culture direction – we need to be able to make choices and how we communicate, and if someone wants to tell me that they have utter control over how I receive information and communicate in my day to day work, that is a form of (ableist?) oppression which needs to be resisted at all costs.