As longtime readers probably know, I have a cat. As cats do, he will sometimes jump on my desk.
Pancake the cat on his royal pillow
Some of you may know that, because my job entails working with a worldwide team, I often have early-morning conference calls. To make this easier, I have a small workstation in my bedroom where I can work and be near the coffee machine. This machine is set up with a Logitech c920 webcam and a Blue Snowball USB microphone.
Most of you probably don’t know that I tend to pace when on telephone calls.
So picture the scene. I’ve straggled out of bed to grab a cup of coffee, yawn and stretch, and get on a call. I’m pacing around and speaking. Suddenly the gentleman I’m speaking to (my long-suffering counterpart, Tony Sterling, who owns our customer experience team) starts cracking up. “Dude, turn your camera off!”
Sure enough, somehow the Teams app had started showing Tony video of me pacing around in my boxers and T-shirt. Thankfully it was only him. I apologized deeply, turned off the camera, and removed Pancake from the keyboard. After the meeting, I scoured the Teams documentation to find out what the keyboard shortcut for controlling the camera was.
There isn’t one. This made me a little nervous, nervous enough to put a Post-It note over the camera lens so Pancake didn’t accidentally turn on the camera one night when I was asleep or something.
Today I was in a Teams meeting. The cat jumped on the keyboard and… voila… I got a macOS permissions dialog asking me whether Teams should have permission to use the camera. He’d done it again!
It turns out that when you’re in a Teams meeting, hitting a key will act like a mouse click on whatever control currently has focus. By default, the camera on/off button has focus. Try it yourself: join a meeting, switch out of the Teams app and back into it, and hit a key.
This is, shall we say, not a great design. I appreciate that the Teams team has provided keyboard focus selection, which is great for accessibility, but having focus default to camera on/off is a recipe for unpleasant surprises.
Lesson learned: since I can’t keep my cat off the keyboard, I’ll keep my webcam covered.
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