We've had a few video meetings at the beginning of this whole plage situation, but after a few weeks, cameras were left turned on just for the initial "hi!"s and "hello!"s, and after that, everyone turned their camera off, because everyboy was watching the shared screen, and probably because noone was wearing pants anymore. Now, we don't even turn them on in the first place.

Even for streamers, audio is _much_ more important than video. You can have a potato webcam and get by, but if your audio sounds like crap nobody is going to stick around at all.

For almost everything, audio is the most important part of video.

Unless one of the participants has some degree of hard-of-hearing, in which case, being able to see the other person's lip movements is really helpful.

I'd be shocked if that really came through with the jitter/compression/etc. IMO Email is king for accessibility, I wish people didn't hate on it so much.

Lots of these tools do real time closed-caption now anyway.

I guess you’re shocked then. Seeing lips is essential for me, even works in poor quality streams.

I love email, but not everyone does well with it. There is no tone or body language with email, you have to read into it and if you don't know what you're looking at or who you're talking with, you have to evaluate all sorts of potentially negative scenarios. Is this person a poor communicator? Are they speaking with a guarded tone because they're covering up? Are they cc:ing and bcc:ing because they're looking to burn me or protect themselves from something? etc. Emails are saved for years and resurface. They are also shared with other people and you may or may not know.

Some people write long emails like reports, other people write very short emails. There is no standard.

The real-time closed captions are gratefully appreciated and much needed from an accessibility standpoint, but they're not perfect. More technical words, accents, etc. all cause difficulties.

If the bandwidth is good and ping time low, video conferencing works very well. You can see and hear when the audio matches the lip movements. It's awful when the audio is not in sync with the video.