Hosting a webinar on Microsoft Teams
For this year's Global Accessibility Awareness Day (21st May 2026), I hosted my first webinar via Microsoft Teams. This was organised and supported by EXP (the agency I work for), and I'm massively grateful for them giving me the platform to try this.
Hosting a webinar is very different from presenting to a room in person. You're suddenly responsible not just for your content, but for decisions around recording, captions, audience participation, motion, and how people might consume the content after the event.
As this was my first webinar, I wanted to jot down some of the things I learned along the way and some of the accessibility considerations that shaped how I planned and delivered it.
The platform
As we use Microsoft Teams internally for communication and many of our clients also use it, we decided to host the webinar there. The creation of the webinar invite isn't too much different from creating an internal meeting event; however, there are some useful settings you can configure to improve both the moderating/presenting and audience experience.
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The examples and screenshots I'm going to be using are creating and setting up a Teams webinar event through the Outlook calendar using the Mac OS app. Microsoft have detailed guides on event setup and considerations that may be easier to follow if using a different operating system or the web version.
Note:
Meeting setup options
Green room
Found under "Production tools", this seems to be checked by default when creating a new webinar event, but if not is a useful feature that allows organisers, moderators and presenters to test video, audio and content sharing before any attendees are admitted. As you're in this space, you'll see people joining the webinar, and you can admit them into a lobby whilst you do your final checks. Only when you start the meeting from the green room will the webinar start.
Recording and transcription
By default, this is turned on by default, but you can set it to either or turn them both off. We left them on, as it allows you to share the webinar with people who registered but may not have been able to attend the event live. Transcription also allows you to have another format for the spoken content of the event that you can distribute or refer to should people need a different way to consume the content. The recording and transcription start as soon as you start the meeting (doesn't record or transcribe the green room, should you have that).
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It's important to ensure people are aware that a session is being recorded. You could do this in the event details when advertising it, and also mention it during your "housekeeping" slide. This gives people the chance to turn cameras off (if they are enabled) and makes them aware that any questions/conversation would be recorded, an important privacy consideration.
Captions
There are a few considerations when it comes to captions. You can enable them by default in the meeting; this way, everybody sees them as soon as the meeting starts. You also choose what languages the captions are available in.
I tried this for a couple of practices, and I'm unsure if it was my mic or the clarity/speed I was speaking at, but I often observed inaccuracies in the live captions that, in some cases, distracted from or misrepresented the content I was delivering.
For this reason, I decided that we would not turn them off by default, but include information on how to turn them on for attendees on an individual basis. Whilst it did possibly inconvenience people with needing to follow these steps, I felt that it put the choice with the attendee, rather than possibly showing inaccurate captions for everybody. Still unsure if this was the right decision, something to think about for future events.
When sharing the video afterwards, you can add your own closed captions to ensure they are accurate. Could you use the webinar transcript as a starting point for them?
Attendee participation
You can also control how attendees can interact with the webinar in general and with each other.
When setting the webinar up, the meeting options give you the option to allow attendees to use their cameras and mics. If planning interactive sections of the webinar, encouraging feedback and questions, these will be key.
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I feel that it's important that even if you enable the camera and mic options, people feel comfortable in their preferences, and ensure that people don't feel pressured into having the camera on and needing to speak up if they would prefer not to.
Another way to encourage feedback, interaction and questions is to use the chat and QA functionality Teams offers. You can set the chat to be live during the meeting only, so the conversation can continue afterwards or turn it off. The QA panel is a great space that can be dedicated to questions/comments directly related to the content. It can lead to excellent discussions and further the content during the time for questions.
Whatever combination of these you go for, I feel it's important to make a distinction to the attendees around the function of both. For example, you might not want people putting questions in the chat and the QA; this could make it difficult for moderators to find popular/commonly themed questions, and important things could get missed.
In my housekeeping slide, I mentioned posting questions in the QA during the presentation of content, any interaction content, for example, asking people to guess a percentage. I made sure to ask people to post these in the chat, not QA.
Content sharing
There are a couple of options for sharing content in a Teams webinar. You can share your screen, which shows the attendees whatever is on the display you decide to share. This would typically be a view screen version of the presentation in whichever tool you used to create it. You then might have your speaker notes on another display if you need them.
The presentation I had was put together in Microsoft PowerPoint and featured a few slides with animations put together by our talented motion designer at EXP. When doing a practice run sharing content via the screen share within Teams, we quickly realised that it was causing issues with the animations; they were very laggy and distracting from the content.
To get around this, I decided to present in Teams via PowerPoint live. This has better support for embedded videos in a Teams live event, and also is actually a much nicer UI from a presenting point of view. It puts your content and speaker notes side-by-side, alongside giving you all the meeting room UI on one screen. I was only using one screen during the event, so I found this so much better than having to share my full screen with no easy access to the meeting UI without stopping the full-screen presentation.
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When sharing via PowerPoint live, you get some extra presentation controls, such as arrow navigation through slides, the ability to annotate content, change contrast modes of the content, and even fully translate slide content. You may not want to give your attendees the ability to be able to use any of these. For example, I restricted access to navigation of the slides, so people couldn't jump ahead/back and removed the ability to annotate slides; the others I was happy with from a preference point of view.
Motion
As mentioned briefly, I had some motion on some slides in my presentation. I feel it's important to make people aware of the extent of this before/at the start of the presentation. Just as on the web, autoplaying, looping content that has animated elements in it can be a trigger for people with vestibular conditions such as motion sickness, or it could cause a distraction from content for people.
Ideally, motion/any video media would not autoplay, and if needed to autoplay (such as slide/content transitions, a short GIF) for the effect to work, it should be short, muted, and not loop.
To be honest, the animations on my slides did loop, which I flagged in my "housekeeping" slide at the very start of the webinar, just to let people know. This is something that I could have done better, I feel, whether that be reducing some of the motion or ensuring it didn't loop. Another strategy would have been to add a little visual indicator on the slide before one that featured motion, allowing me to remind people that the next slide would have motion.
Content accessibility
I'm not just adding this in as my webinar topic was accessibility-related; no matter the subject, it's important to make sure the content you present is accessible. Check your slides' colour contrast, add alt text to your images, and describe any images on your slides to attendees, add captions to any embedded video that has spoken audio and structure your content properly (slide titles, etc). Not only will this benefit people watching your presentation, but it'll also set you up well for ensuring that when you share your content after the event, you're sharing an accessible digital document.
Before the event
When advertising/marketing the event, be as upfront as possible about what people might expect, also provide a way/give people the option to get in touch about any content allowances they might require, or ask about the delivery and ways it could be adapted.
As mentioned previously, also flag if the session will be recorded and the deck shared. I've heard people have avoided this at times, due to it increasing drop-offs for the live event as people know they will be able to catch it afterwards, but time doesn't always pan out, things come up for people that prevents them from attending, so I think it's nice to show that they won't be excluded from watching the event if that happens and they can go through things in their own time.
After the event
Once the event is finished, and depending on whether you recorded and planned to share the content, it can be useful to give yourself a few days or so to review your content, make sure it passed accessibility checks, and add accurate captions to your recording before sharing.
Wrapping up
Overall, I'm really happy with how the webinar went and grateful to have had the opportunity to try this format for the first time. There are some things I'd change for future events, such as exploring other hosting platforms and being more proactive in communicating the inclusive features available to attendees, but those are exactly the kinds of lessons that only come from doing it.
One thing this experience reinforced for me is that accessibility shouldn't be based on assumptions about your audience. Even if you think everyone attending will have similar needs, designing an inclusive experience from the outset means nobody is unintentionally excluded. Whether someone is attending live, watching a recording later, or consuming the content in a different format entirely, small decisions made during planning can have a significant impact on how accessible the experience ultimately is.