Mark Riccobono:
One of the first things that I did in the Office of the President based on the priorities of this convention was wrote to the CEO of Microsoft to express our deep frustration with accessibility at Microsoft. And the Federation requested respectfully, but with some urgency that we needed a meeting with the CEO of Microsoft to talk about accessibility because of who we are as an organization and because of who he is as a corporate leader. Satya Nadella invited me to come to Microsoft for a meeting in 2014, which I reported to you on during my 2015 presidential report.
Our relationship with Microsoft 10 years ago was in a much different place than it is today, and one of the people that participated in that meeting, I think the first time that I met our speaker this afternoon was at that meeting just over 10 years ago, and we've been on a journey with Microsoft since then.
Continuing to grow and strengthen our trusted relationship where we give Microsoft honest but frank feedback on the product direction and with our speaker today, we talk often more about policy as much as we talk about the products themselves and the technology she has proven to be a champion for us at Microsoft, but also in other spaces.
And equally as important, she sincerely respects and invites the honest feedback. She's not afraid of the hard conversation and she's always willing to talk about where some of the limitations might be and to find a path to work together to continue to advance the approach.
So this presentation is about really the last decade of work that we have done in partnership with Microsoft and maybe the next 10 years of our partnership. We're pleased to invite back to our stage the Vice President and Chief Accessibility Officer at Microsoft. Here's our friend Jenny Lay-Flurrie.
Jenny Lay-Flurrie:
Good afternoon. How are we doing? Very loud. I happen to know you can do better than that. How are we doing? Alright folks, I'm going to need that energy to continue. I am deaf and I cannot hear you, but I can see it and I enjoy it.
My name is Jenny Lay-Flurrie. I am the Chief accessibility Officer at Microsoft. I have flown here from Seattle where it is, well, 70 degrees and sunny, which is a little different to what I saw outside before I came in here. I should explain my accent. That is a British accent.
I don't want any misunderstanding. I am not Australian and I live in Washington state, so for you guys in the corner, I'm waving at you because I love you dearly. I'm here to talk about many different things. By the way, I should also explain because of my deafness, you're going to hear a bit of deaf accent, so please if I mispronounce, will you forgive me?
Okay, I'm glad we got that one out the way. I'm going to talk a little bit about how I got to Microsoft and the journey that we have collectively been on. How did I go and well come from London to Seattle?
Well, let me just first explain that I joined Microsoft to work on a little product called Hotmail, anyone amazing product. I moved two years later I moved to live in Seattle to work on another product called Bing.
I like Bing. My day job was figuring out advertising search, trying to compete with this little thing called Google. My night job was building the disability employee group at Microsoft. Some of that group are in the room today.
In fact, some of the accessibilitarians, which is our beautiful accessible community at Microsoft are also here today and I love and adore them all. It started incredibly small. I've now been at Microsoft 20 years. I've been a CCO, chief accessibility officer for 10.
I've witnessed many, many, many shifts both in technology, people and accessibility. I'm a user of accessibility. I sign, I use captioning, and I'm deeply grateful for the incredible ASL interpreters and caption as you have at this event, including my own ASL interpreter Mary who sat right in front of me.
What I want to do is take you through some of that learning and I will mention that Dan Goldstein, who's sitting down here when I got this job, told me that I needed to write it down. He told me that 10 years ago and I laughed.
I did not think that I would ever be standing on a stage as glorious as this one trying to recall history and learning as I think about the future of accessibility. But here we are. Dan, I should have followed your advice and I did not.
So I'm going to take a stab at it. I'm going to talk a little bit about the past, the present, and the future. Are you with me? All right, well, let me start with a little bit of tech history. I'm going to go back a little further than Mark said, and I'm going to actually talk about where we are and where Microsoft is because we're actually celebrating a birthday this year. Microsoft is 50 years old, so am I, but I don't want to talk about that.
It's terrifying. I will also say that we are celebrating over 30 years of accessibility at Microsoft. The first decade, 30 years. The first decade was kind of an interesting one when I go back and I did go back down. We built a lot of foundational practices.
We put a new company-wide policy on accessibility and in 1995 for those that were still were around at that time, Microsoft launched its first set of accessibility features in the menu that included Sound Sentry sounds so weird now Sound Sentry, high contrast, and access to this product, which many of you may use today, Zoom text.
For those with longer memories. We had some features before that. The first greeting, I actually dug around and went into our history books and I sort of pulled out all the newspapers. They were paper newspapers back then. The first greeting was actually a product called Slim Wear Windows Bridge.
Anyone remember that? In 1992, which was in Windows 3.1. Can you believe it? It actually was the first thing that gave access to the graphical interface. Our first proper feature was in 1994. It's a feature that actually is still in our product today, it's called Sticky Keys, and you will hit it if you hit shift too many times.
It's still invaluable to our friends in the mobility community. Windows 95 went down well, but as always, disabled people know best. And in 1998 we had our first community meeting. That was where the guy that you will probably know called Bill Gates. Bill Gates met with a room, an audience that included the late and the great Judy Heumann.
That room requested many, many features to be a part of Microsoft and to be part of our products and top of the list perfectly won't surprise you. An inbox screen reader. Narrator launched in 2000. It wasn't a great launch as Mark tells me often. But I will also say that internally within Microsoft, our internal community was growing.
In fact, that's where I was focused. The ERG at Microsoft is probably my proudest accomplishment in my time and tenure at the company. By the way, I'm not done. I've got way more to do. In 2010, we launched this little conference called the Ability Summit.
It had 20 people in it, the first year, 20 people, and I thought that was a raving success. It's still going 15 years on and in March this year we welcomed 21,000 people and I pinch myself and then it's very clear why that is.
Employee feedback. Customer feedback is invaluable to the future of our products. You have made our products better with your feedback and you've kept us grounded. You told us when we change the Outlook ribbon, you told us how you felt and we heard you. We also launched some really important services in that period of time. Just before Mark sent me his love letter, we launched very importantly, the disability answer desk. Who uses it? DAD Anyone heard of the DAD team? Aka.Ms/Dad.
Crystal Jones from our team is here today. We launched it with just five agents today. It takes over 10,000 calls a month. Your feedback, your questions, your issues, the error message, which is never happen on Windows, but sometimes maybe they do. We work to get them fixed quickly.
You can contact us and speak to any of our agents, but more importantly, you can also use the latest technology, AI and Be My eyes and I'm grateful to our partnership with Be My Eyes. 50% of queries from blind people coming to DAD today are solved by Be My Eyes and AI.
We also launched the Supported Employment program, which hires intellectual developmental disabilities into Microsoft. This is a program that today operates in 28 countries and has over 600 hires. And here's the kicker. We do not support Subminimum wage.
We believe everyone is entitled to fair wages and we do not work with 14 (c) certificate holders, which brings me to the last decade and the future decade. When I came into this position at the end of 2015, I had a humbling place to start.
The only way was up. I put in a new series of goals to empower every person, every organization to achieve more in education, in employment, in the workplace, at home, and in play.
Because at the core, accessibility does one very important thing. It makes life possible. It makes everything easier. Reflecting back, it was a challenging time. Windows was launching every three to five years office every two years, and there was this little thing called a Windows phone. I'm not going to talk about that.
Gaming was new. LinkedIn was coming in. LinkedIn, by the way, updates three times a day. My job has evolved since Microsoft has over 6,000 products, websites, and tools. And my job is to shepherd those 335 buildings and to make sure that our workplace and our hiring practices are accessible for everyone.
We are not perfect, but I'm incredibly proud at how accessibility has become part of our DNA. There's a couple of things that I've learned from this. One, every employee in every company should be trained on accessibility.
This year alone, we have trained 235,000 Microsoft employees on their obligations to make every product, every website, every tool, every meeting, every event accessible. We need every person to know this. We made that training publicly available by the way, you can take it, you can have a look at it.
We ripped out the Microsoft stuff, by the way. It's gone. All the nerdy stuff, we just put the framework out. 5.5 million have taken that training so far, and my new goal is far higher than that. The team doesn't know that yet.
Accessibility must be managed as a business as a priority. That means that you have to have consistent monitoring of what you do and you have to move accessibility instead of break fix to build by design. Our testing tools that we use, which is accessibility insights.io, we have made available and free online for everyone to use. We have to remember number three, that compliance is the floor, not the ceiling.
I want every product to be usable, delightful, easy for everyone and compliance is a beautiful thing, but it is not the goal. I love that Office now has an accessibility assistant that makes making an accessible document easier. Microsoft Teams has taken this theory. They've just actually launched reflow and Xbox.
Well, they said they needed a screen reader and it got one, and then four, you've got to innovate with people. The biggest, most important innovation that I think we probably created was done by an incredible person who is here today, Saqib who created Seeing AI, which is used every month by hundreds of thousands of blind and low-vision people. It is our only medically certified device at Microsoft, and it continues to evolve. Seeing AI now provides video descriptions free.
And if you haven't downloaded it on your fruity device or your robot device, what are you doing? Get on it right now. So let's talk about the future. We're not perfect, but we're committed and we've learned a lot.
And of course, the future includes one little thing that I haven't yet mentioned, artificial intelligence. Anyone heard about it? Let me just add to the beautiful words of Jonathan Mosen. AI is not new. It started in the 1950s and it's gone through incredible chapters in its journey from descriptive to predictive to prescriptive. Good grief. Did I say that right?
That's a lot. And what everyone is talking about right now, generative AI. Generative AI is revolutionary. It trains on immense amounts of data, immense texts, images, audio, and video to learn patterns and relationships. Once it's trained, it does not need to look at the code.
You can point a camera at a screen and it will describe what it sees in inordinate amount of detail. That training is important, but it means that the quality gets better and better and better. What it means to you is that you can get on the spot context on images.
Images that previously required manual tagging. Does it replace the need for accessibility and code level design? Absolutely not. Which is why I love that Microsoft called its AI copilot. Copilot. When it came out, we were like, what? But it makes so much sense. You are in control. AI is your copilot.
We are early on this journey, but we are learning so much. We are learning that it can have a profound impact on blind and low vision. We're also learning that it can have a profound impact on other communities, especially neurodiverse. We did a study with EY.
We spoke to 300 people across 17 companies, and 91% said that copilot is a helpful assistive technology, an assistive technology that floored me. But this is the next chapter and the one that we get to write if we use the learning from the last decade.
There are a couple of key principles as we go forward. One, we have to remember the basics. AI tools must be accessible. They must be navigable.
They must be usable and delightful. It must be easy to find them. Even yesterday, Xbox made sure that every single game in the xbox.com and digital priorities sets now have tags.
So you can see all of the features, every single one before you download and buy them. Simple things that make gaming discoverable. And by the way, my recommendations are Forza, Sea of Thieves and Flight Simulator, all of which are great for blind and low vision.
Just saying. Data must be representative. And we've got to innovate. And I will say, this is where I'm come back to my partnership with Mark. We took a risk a few months ago and did something that no one else has done.
We methodically partnered with an organization that we love and trust Be My Eyes, to buy data, to bring data from Be My Eyes into our AI, to train it, in fact 21 million minutes of data and train it on blindness, on canes, on dogs, and the use of technology so that when you search for blind imagery, you get representative results.
Not societal lens of what it thinks blindness is, which as we know isn't great. It was done carefully, thoughtfully with privacy and security, always top of mind and consent. And I called Mark and I said, I'm a bit nervous about this one. I'm a bit nervous. And so did Mike sitting back there. And Mark said, we need to do it. AI must be representative of blind and low-vision people.
I'm really thrilled to share with you that the results of this are beginning to come through when you create an image using Bing creator coming through, which will give you the ability to create Marvel type image or a cartoon image of anything or anyone.
The data, if you ask it to create a blind person of any kind, will be representative and accurate. There will be no ski masks, night masks, or any of the ilk that you may have seen on search materials before because of this training. So as I wrap up, I know I need to wrap up because the food here is so good, so good.
We are in Louisiana, people. We are at an inflection point. We have huge challenges. Just one to two percent of websites are accessible today. Just breathe that in. It's a number that hasn't changed. And Mark and I have talked about many times, how do we change this?
I believe that AI is going to have a big part to play in that dilemma. AI will understand images and pictures. It won't replace the need for code level accessibility, but it will give you another tool, another assistive technology.
Technology is a changing people. I cannot wait to see what happens in the next five to 10 years. I cannot wait to hear your feedback, whether it's to me directly or to DAD. Let me mention that again, Aka.Ms/Dad
We collectively need to be guardians of this next chapter to make sure that AI does not produce the harms. I do not want to see it impacting employment. By the way. We do not use AI tools. That is not our charter.
And I have trained every single recruiter at Microsoft, and if we see the word JAWS, MBDA, blind or low vision, we go after that. Talent accessibility needs to be driven by the blind and low-vision community and my colleagues in the deaf, neurodiverse and disabled.
So my ask to you all is to try it. I do not care what device you use. I don't care if it's fruity. I don't care if it's robot, I don't care if it's a PC, although I do recommend download Seeing AI, try copilot and please give us your feedback and a deep, huge hug.
And thank you to all of you for the feedback, the patience and resilience that you have given me and my team as we have charted this journey. And a special thank you to Mark Riccobono, thank you for your time.