VocaVista
When someone shares slides, a spreadsheet, or a browser window in Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex, or Google Meet, that content leaves their machine as video. A screen reader has nothing to read. Blind and low-vision participants end up sitting through a meeting about a document they cannot get at, relying on whoever is presenting to remember to describe it.
VocaVista captures the shared window, describes what is on it aloud, and speaks again when the content changes — so you can follow a deck as it advances, on your own, without asking anyone to slow down.
See it work
A two-minute recording from a real Zoom meeting: a deck is shared from another Mac, and VocaVista describes each slide as it changes. The voice you hear is VocaVista. Captions are VocaVista's own words, and the full transcript is below the video.
Read the transcript of the four descriptions
- Title slide. The image displays a single slide from a presentation with a white background and black text. The main heading reads “Q3 Accessibility Review”. Below it, a subheading states “AccessibilityX — internal test deck, 20 August 2026”. The slide is viewed within a browser window, indicated by the address bar and browser window controls. Two green “Mo” icons are visible at the top of the screen, likely indicating participants or a conferencing interface.
- Agenda. A presentation slide with a white background and black text is displayed. The slide has a heading labeled “Agenda” followed by a bulleted list containing four items: “Screen reader coverage across the product”, “Remediation backlog and burn-down”, “Budget request for the next two quarters”, and “Open questions”.
- Chart. A bar chart titled “Revenue by quarter” displays four vertical blue bars, each labeled with a quarter and its corresponding revenue value in thousands of dollars. The leftmost bar is labeled “Q1 $120k”, the next is “Q2 $220k”, the third is “Q3 $300k”, and the rightmost is “Q4 $380k”. The bars increase in height from left to right, indicating a rising trend in revenue across the quarters.
- Table. A table titled “Defects by severity” is displayed with three columns: “Severity”, “Open”, and “Closed”. Under “Severity”, the rows are “Critical”, “Major”, and “Minor”. Corresponding to “Critical”, the values are 3 under “Open” and 41 under “Closed”. For “Major”, the values are 17 under “Open” and 96 under “Closed”. For “Minor”, the values are 52 under “Open” and 210 under “Closed”.
What it does
- Describes the shared window on demand, or automatically as the content changes
- Reads tables row by row, pairing each label with its values
- Keeps a transcript of every description — read it back at your own pace, or on a refreshable braille display
- Spatial audio places descriptions in one ear, separate from the meeting audio
- Adjustable voice, speech rate, and volume, and a hotkey to silence a description instantly
- Used in real meetings on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex, and Google Meet
Private by design
Everything runs on your Mac. No frame of the shared screen is sent to a cloud service. What appears on a shared screen at work is routinely confidential — financial figures, medical records, unreleased plans, legal documents. A tool that has to upload that in order to describe it is not one most organisations can approve, and not one anyone should have to accept as the price of taking part in a meeting.
Join the beta
We are looking for testers who use a screen reader and sit through screen shares. Tell us a little about your setup — which Mac you use, and which meeting platforms you are in most — and we will get you set up personally.
For organisations
If your team includes blind or low-vision employees who join meetings where screens are shared, VocaVista is built to be deployable in environments where uploading meeting content to a third party is not permitted. More for organisations.