Zoom Reactions and the Raise Hand Shortcut (Alt+Y)

Alt+Y raises and lowers your hand in a Zoom meeting — Option+Y on macOS. Pressing it again lowers the hand. This is the only reaction in Zoom with a documented default keyboard shortcut. **The emoji reactions do not have one.** Thumbs up, clapping, the heart and the rest live in the same Reactions panel on the meeting toolbar, and reaching them means opening that panel and clicking. Plenty of published shortcut lists claim a numbered combination for them; treat those with suspicion, because Zoom's own keyboard-shortcut settings do not ship one by default. If you find a combination that works on your machine, it is almost certainly one you or your organisation assigned. **You can assign one yourself.** Zoom's Settings under Keyboard Shortcuts lists every bindable action with its current key, and unassigned actions can be given one. The same screen has an Enable Global Shortcut checkbox per shortcut, which makes it fire even when Zoom is not the focused application — genuinely useful for mute, and worth considering for raise hand if you are often taking notes in another window during a call. **Raise Hand behaves differently from the emoji reactions, and the difference is the point.** Raise Hand, along with the yes/no and speed-up/slow-down indicators, persists until dismissed. Emoji reactions are transient and clear themselves after a few seconds. That is why Raise Hand is the one worth a keyboard shortcut: it is a request that needs to stay visible until someone responds to it, whereas a thumbs up is an acknowledgement that has served its purpose the moment it is seen. **Hosts can lower hands, and often do.** A host can lower an individual hand or all hands at once, which is standard practice for moving through a queue in a large meeting. If your hand disappears without you pressing anything, that is why rather than a bug. **Gesture recognition is a separate feature.** Zoom can detect a physically raised hand or a thumbs up from your camera and turn it into the corresponding reaction, if the feature is enabled in settings and your video is on. It is off by default in most configurations. Where it is enabled, it accounts for the occasional mystery of a reaction appearing that nobody pressed a key for. **The shortcuts most worth knowing during a call are the other two.** Alt+A toggles mute and Alt+V toggles video on Windows, with Cmd+Shift+A and Cmd+Shift+V on macOS. Those are the ones you need in the second before you can think, and unlike reactions they are bound by default on both platforms. Raise Hand is a useful third, but it is rarely urgent in the same way. **Reactions can be disabled by the host or by an account administrator**, in which case neither the toolbar panel nor any shortcut produces anything. Webinars and large managed meetings often have them limited to a subset. If Alt+Y does nothing and the Reactions button is missing from the toolbar, that is the explanation rather than a keyboard problem, and it is not something a participant can change.