Increasing the Investment in Accessibility: Nonvisual Access in Microsoft Products and Services

Increasing the Investment in Accessibility: Nonvisual Access in Microsoft Products and Services

Braille Monitor
November 2015

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Increasing the Investment in Accessibility: Nonvisual Access in Microsoft Products and Services
by John Jendrezak
From the Editor: John Jendrezak is ‎Partner Director of Program Management at Microsoft. Since the accessibility of products that run on the Windows Platform is crucial, we have worked extensively with Microsoft to press for measureable improvements, and this is the report Mr. Jendrezak provided to the convention:
Thank you, Mark, for the intro; hopefully I can live up to the expectations of the group here. First of all, as many other people have done today, I really want to congratulate everybody on the seventy-fifth anniversary for the NFB. Your years of advocating are great, and we really appreciate everything that you do. On behalf of Microsoft employees who are here throughout the week, we are honored to have the opportunity to partner with you. We’ve had more employees at this convention than we’ve ever had before, so hopefully you’ve really felt our presence. We’ve appreciated the opportunity to listen, to connect, and to share ideas with you throughout the week. We’re looking forward to taking your feedback back to our teams in Redmond.

At Microsoft I’m an engineering manager on the Office development team. I’m here specifically to talk to you today about Office and the work we’re doing to improve accessibility. I’ve worked on the Office team for over twenty years, but my personal involvement in accessibility began two years ago with the implementation of CVAA [Communications and Video Accessibility Act]. The work that you all have done to have CVAA passed has been great, and that involvement that I’ve had personally has really whet my appetite for accessibility, and my passion and involvement has been growing ever since. So thank you.

We believe that the Office products are essential for you to be successful in your work and your personal lives. Communicating and collaborating with people, whether they’re your coworkers, your friends, businesses or other institutions is part of what we all do on a regular basis. When we release products that aren’t accessible, we make it difficult for you to succeed professionally and personally, and that’s not acceptable. [Applause] I was recently reminded of this in a poignant way when I spoke with a woman at our ability conference this spring. She’s blind, and she shared with me her personal story about how she had to drop a college course because she had to use Microsoft Project, and it wasn’t accessible with her screenreader. That’s just not acceptable. We do not think that our software should prohibit people from going to college [Applause]. So by getting involved and leaning in, I think we can make a big difference and a big change for the better.

This is my first opportunity to attend the conference, and I’m very excited about it, but I can definitely say we’ve appreciated working with the NFB over the years. You’ve always provided us with very candid feedback, which is great—grateful for that. It’s really really helped us out. So I wanted to spend a couple minutes and really share some of what we’re doing today to improve accessibility of Office.

On the desktop, our apps have had a long history of accessibility through the partnerships we’ve developed with the AT [assistive technology] community. The apps continue to lead the industry in terms of functionality and availability to our customers who are disabled, but, with that said, we have to continue to improve the experience. We’ve made some progress over the year; I’d like to share a little bit of that with everybody. Our core mission, really, is to deliver the best productivity experience to all of you across all of our products, across all of the devices that you use them on. We’re clearly unique in that we bring productivity to you on any device you own, whether it’s a Windows, a Mac, an Android, or an iOS device. We really want to respect your choice and deliver the best experience to you. We’ve been busy over the last two years building versions of Office that span multiple platforms with the goal of providing this productivity experience across all of our devices. We’ve made Office accessible for iOS by adding VoiceOver support across our core iPhone and iPad devices. The early feedback for that has been super positive. We want to keep hearing feedback for those applications so that we can drive further improvements to them.

I’m sure many of you use iPads and iPhones, so hopefully you’re able to use our products with them. We’ve also made Mac Office accessible for the first time. [Cheers] We released just yesterday Mac Office 2016, so if you have a Mac, I highly suggest you go download it, try it out, and give us feedback.

Again, there’s no doubt that the NFB gives us good feedback. I’ll probably say that over and over and over again. It’s awesome that we have such an active and passionate partner; you definitely keep us on our toes.

One specific piece of feedback for the Office team over the last year is that we need to improve our keyboarding workflows in Office. Based on that, we’ve made improvements to our overall workflow so that our keyboard shortcuts are consistent across our desktop and our Office online products. We’ve taken it a step further; we’ve found ways to improve and speed up the overall keyboard interaction by simplifying the steps needed to get things done. We’ll continue to work in this space over the coming year, so watch for more improvements.

This year we also launched a third-party AT partnership program for desktop users and have since expanded it to all of our Office365 subscribers. AT providers provide an important part of the Office accessibility experience, and in 2013 we approached all of our partners to find ways to provide this experience in a more affordable way. After reaching out to our core partners in the screenreader market, we’re proud to have partnered with GW Micro (now Ai Squared) to make Window-Eyes available to all of our customers free. [applause]

Finally I want to highlight a new feature that we’re shipping called Tell Me. Tell Me is a feature that helps our customers find and use Office features. It’s a feature that’s a great example of how we can design for accessibility and how we want to evolve our engineering culture to really weave accessibility into the fabric of our team. I’m sure you’ve all been in the situation where you’re using a product, maybe Excel as an example, and in the back of your mind you’re trying to remember how to do something, and you can’t quite figure it out, and you don’t know where that feature or that functionality is in the product. It’s a problem for any user using our product: search through the ribbon, and the tabs, and figure out what’s going on—and I can imagine that with a screenreader it’s even a little bit more challenging. Tell Me helps avoid that frustration by allowing you to type what you want to do using your own words and phrasing into a simple search box. We then expose the best matches for what you’re trying to do, and you can execute the features right there from that search in the product. [Applause] It’s a great example, we think, of combining natural language input with machine learning to help really build the best experience for our customers to access the functionality of Office. Now, coincidentally, while managing that team that built that functionality, I was also responsible for the accessibility work that we were doing. We were going through our CVAA implementation at the time, and I was involved in an early demo of that Tell Me feature. Because of my newly-heightened awareness of accessibility, I just asked simple questions like: Can you hotkey into that feature? Is there anything we can do here to help people with disabilities? What happens if you turn a screenreader on when you’re using the feature? And just from that kind of serendipitous involvement that I had with these two teams, it really helped us build a feature that we think is a great way to help our customers with blindness accomplish the tasks with less effort, while also keeping all of our users able to discover commands more readily. This is the type of universal design we really strive to deliver: functionality that helps everybody.

This was also a great career-level lesson for me—it really was. The thing that I took away was that, in order to make material improvements, to find those serendipitous moments, to build Office for everyone, we really need to have local awareness of disability. This is similar to what Kannan talked about, I think, with Google as well. We at Microsoft need to increase the diversity within our engineering organization. This “Tell Me moment,” as I call it, not only created a new capability for our customers, but really set our organization down a path to materially change the culture and composition of our team. Our CEO Satya Nadella has said, “The world is diverse. We will better serve everyone on the planet by representing everyone on the planet. We will be open to learning our own biases and changing our behaviors so we can tap into the collective power of everyone at Microsoft. We don’t just value differences, we seek them out, we invite them in. And as a result, our ideas are better, our products are better, and our customers are better served.” [Applause] It’s really important that we encourage a culture that sees accessibility as an ongoing investment that results in better designs for all of our users right up-front, as opposed to relegating it to a task that we complete afterwards at the end of design and development. We’ve operated that way in the past, and it really is our goal to change that: to establish an engineering culture that’s inquisitive about accessibility early on, and on-point to carry that through the end of development. So now with implementation of Tell Me, first in the Office online apps, and soon to be delivered in our Office 2016 applications, you can hotkey right into Tell Me, find what you want, and get your task done quickly. [Applause]

I want to spend a minute talking about the things we want to do to change our culture. Again, it’s eerily similar to what Kannan talked about, but one of the things we really want to do is change the culture in the Office organization because until you change the culture, you’re not going to change the way they behave. I really believe that if we want to move the culture of our organization in a direction that thinks first about inclusive design, you have to start with the makeup of the engineers on your team. To that end, we’re making intentional changes in our hiring practices. We’re partnering with our corporate accessibility and human resources team to develop recruiting pipelines specifically for engineers with disabilities. [Applause] Our goal, and we have a number of active open positions today, is to hire a number of engineers with blindness, deafness, and learning disabilities into our engineering teams to help the culture that we strive for. Over the coming months we’ll be hiring fully qualified engineers to come work on products like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote—and I can say from my personal experience that when someone on your team has a disability, it really makes a big difference in how you think about your product and the features in your product overall. A few years ago we hired a program manager in our user experience team who has a severe hearing disability. After she was hired we watched her quickly become one of our rising stars, and we noticed direct influences on our team culture as communication improved significantly. She’s able to provide a different perspective, and often provides insights and makes connections that other people on the team don’t because of her personal experience. She has a great perspective on how to make our products more accessible, and we want more people like her in our organization. [Applause] On a related note, while she’s not on the Office team specifically, and apparently she’s on loan, we’re excited to have one of your own, Anne Taylor, at Microsoft—I’m really looking forward to working with her.

In addition to changing our perspective on how we’re hiring engineers, we’re also changing the way we think about our engineering process. When we began our efforts to build versions of Office for iOS, Android, and Windows 10, we quickly realized the software code written for apps was specific for each platform; our code wasn’t able to run across platforms. Over the last couple of years we’ve worked hard to bring that together so that we can simultaneously release our products across multiple platforms. There’s a bunch of engineers back in Washington that are patting themselves on the back for their increased efficiency, but that’s not the important part here. The important thing for everyone here is that, by doing this work so that our features are built to be cross-platform for all devices roughly at the same time, it’s now possible for us to make faster advances in our accessibility improvements. Because, as we make those changes to our common code base, they will accrue to all of our endpoints and will be able to release accessibility improvements at a much more rapid pace. We’re also changing the cadence we work at Microsoft. We used to build Office on a three-year-long lifecycle, and if we delivered a product to market that didn’t have the accessibility features you were looking for, it took three years for another one to come out. We’re changing that, and we’re releasing our product every month, so we’ll be able to work regularly on accessibility. [Applause]

And finally we’re raising the visibility of accessibility at Microsoft. Within Office, we’ve made accessibility one of our core investments for the next wave of development. I personally oversee the effort, and I’ll be working with our organizational leaders to improve the accessibility of our products and reinforce the culture of inclusive design that we strive for.

To conclude, let me talk a little bit about what we have planned for the next year. Specifically, we’re going to continue to provide Tell Me support for all Office applications across all platforms and all devices, making it easier than ever for everyone to harness the power of Office. We’re going to make our Android and Windows 10 applications accessible. We’ll continue to improve the accessibility of our desktop applications, insuring that with our partners we’re delivering best-in-class accessibility. We’ll monitor the feedback we’re getting from iOS and Mac releases and continue to improve those products. We’re going to further improve Office online reading and editing scenarios so that our web applications more closely match the desktop applications. We’re going to continue to move to shared code so that we have more rapid and consistent accessibility features. Finally, we’re going to be more engaged with this community. That increased involvement started here this week, and we want to continue it throughout the year. With that, thank you very much for the opportunity to speak.

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