Last updated 24 January 2024 22:00 GMT
We want to ensure all our Braillists events are as safe a space as possible for the community. We also wish to ensure that all attendees have an equal opportunity to participate. We therefore adhere to the following Moderation Policy for our Zoom calls:
- A waiting room will be in operation until the event starts, and possibly throughout the event as well. Attendees will not be admitted to our events until their designated start time, and you may experience a short delay afterwards.
- All attendees will have their audio muted when they join any of our events. The moderator may use his/her discretion as to whether attendees are subsequently able to unmute themselves, but a general rule of thumb is that unmuting without consent will only be permitted in more relaxed sessions. If you wish to speak and you have been disallowed from unmuting, you can attract a hosts attention by raising your hand (see our Instructions page for further information), and we will endeavour to allow you to unmute at the next available opportunity.
- Users have been disallowed from sharing their screens, setting virtual backgrounds and changing their display names after joining. The moderator may, however, rename attendees whose display names are inaccurate or cumbersome or which contain personal information (e.g. telephone numbers) at his/her discretion.
In addition, we would request that attendees remain mindful of the following:
- Our calls are open to everyone and should therefore be treated as public spaces. We therefore advise you to refrain from sharing any sensitive personal information.
- Attendees under the age of 18 must only attend with the permission and/or supervision of a parent/guardian.
- If you are unmuted whilst using your screen reader, you should assume that other people can hear it. This is immensely distracting for other participants and may lead to inadvertent broadcasting of private and/or sensitive information, e.g. if your screen reader automatically reads incoming emails. To mitigate this, we ask that, wherever possible, you use headphones while using text-to-speech, or switch off text-to-speech entirely and use a braille display.
- To respect the privacy of other participants, please refrain from making audio recordings of our sessions. Where a session is likely to have a long shelf-life or be of special significance to the Braillists community, it will be officially recorded by a designated member of the Braillists team and made available via our Media page, the Braillecast podcast and/or other means publicised in connection with the live event.
- Chat. While you are able to communicate during events with all attendees via Zoom’s chat facility, please keep your messages on topic, useful, respectful and succinct. You do not need to restate the question in detail. We reserve the right to switch off the chat facility. Individuals posting high volume or lengthy messages may be asked to desist, and in extreme cases we reserve the right to remove individuals who are adversely impacting the experience for other attendees.
In the unlikely event that we experience severe disruption during our events, we will immediately mute all participants and, if necessary, prevent participants from unmuting and remove the offending individual(s).
In the extraordinarily unlikely event that we are not able to contain the disruption by means of these measures, or if a technical failure prevents us from adhering to this policy, we may need to terminate the session early. In this event, we will endeavour to verbally announce this decision in the session itself, and we will subsequently communicate with attendees to the best of our ability to outline next steps. Where events require pre-registration, this will most likely be by direct email; for open events, we will most likely publish a notice in our Newsletter and on our social media channels.
If you have any concerns relating to safeguarding or moderation while using the Braillists Zoom facilities, please contact [email protected].