Google Meet will now let you “multipin” things during video calls including participant’s feeds and active presentations. This can be useful for a number of reasons but is primarily being advertised as an accessibility feature as that’s how it was first announced last month during Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
For example, someone who is deaf or hard of hearing could pin their sign language interpreter and the presentation being discussed at the same time, making it much easier to track with the flow of the meeting without having to switch back and forth.
For anyone else, this will certainly be a much easier way to multitask and take more information in at once. In my opinion, “multipinning” seems like an essential feature for larger meetings or just meetings in general as there’s usually a lot happening at once!
In order to pin a meeting participant’s video or a presentation, just hover over a tile and click the thumbtack “pin” icon. If someone does not appear in the layout, but you still want to pin them or their screen share, just click the People panel at the bottom right of the call to see everything simultaneously, and then hover over the tile you want to pin and follow the same process. Of course, you can ‘unpin’ anyone or anything by reverse-engineering the steps and clicking the thumbtack again.
We’ve all become accustomed to pinning either nothing or one video feed at a time, but with this update, tell me – do you see yourself “pinning all of the things”? or are you going to stick to letting Meet actively switch the large tile depending on who’s speaking or what’s being presented? Let me know in the comments. If you’re going to use this feature for accessibility during a meeting, I’d also love to hear how useful you think this will end up being!
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