Hosts Eamon McErlean and Joe Devon interview Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Chief Accessibility Officer at Microsoft. They discuss Jenny's role as CAO at Microsoft, her appreciation for music and how she enjoys it as someone who is deaf, the future of accessibility and artificial intelligence, and more.
OUTLINE:
00:00 Opening Teaser
00:25 Introduction
00:55 Early Days; First Computer
05:45 Music For People Who Are Deaf
08:51 Assistive Tech For Music
10:44 Deaf Community
14:35 Sign Language
16:31 Chief Accessibility Officer at Microsoft
23:30 Best Practice: Scale
25:33 Seeing AI
29:20 Working with People with Disabilities
34:08 Captioning Profanity
37:08 Accessibility and Gen AI
42:22 Accessibility During The Pandemic
45:25 What's Ahead?
50:45 GitHub / Accessibility Community
56:18 Wrap Up
EPISODE LINKS:
Accessibility at Microsoft
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/
Seeing AI
https://www.seeingai.com
PODCAST INFO:
Podcast Website: https://accessibility-and-gen-ai.simplecast.com
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/46eflnv
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4eEwo3jUSo3aS7wGhlcxs2
RSS: https://feeds.simplecast.com/nCrQiw1t
LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/a11ygenai
- One of the best things about working in accessibility is that you get to work with every part of the company. One meeting is with office and the next meeting is with Xbox, and very different culture and vibe, and I love that. I smile. All day, every day, mostly.
- Welcome to episode three of Accessibility and Gen AI, a podcast that interviews the newsmakers and thought leaders in the world of accessibility and artificial intelligence. I'm Joe Devon, and I'm joined by co-host Eamon McERLEAN. Today we are interviewing Jenny Le Flurry, the Chief Accessibility Officer of Microsoft, a passionate advocate for disability and proud supporter of Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Jenny, welcome to the pod.
- Hello both of you, it's lovely to be here.
- Thank you. So let's get started and go way back to your first computer, which I understand was a Sinclair ZX80. Take us back to the day that you got your Sinclair computer and describe what was it like to use it.
- All right, do you realize how far back we're going here? I mean, this is not, I love, we start in the '80s and so it was a ZX81, my next computer was a Dragon 32. And that was incredibly exciting, and then we went into BBCs and all manner things. I loved it, it was this little tiny thing with a press down keys and so it was flat to touch but my dad mounted it on just a wooden board, so that I could play with it. And I had some coding books and I spent some time go-to line, it was that level of literal basic and I had a ton of fun, I would spend hours, hours with that thing, I loved it. So the keys wore out, which is what happened, and I had my tape player next to it and I would do the bing bong, bing bong thing with getting on connected. Yeah, I mean, we really are going back, Joe.
- I remember those days, that's why. I loved those days, they were so fun.
- It was wonderful, it was a great way to learn all about the start of computing, which is really what it was back then.
- Likewise, we're the same, mine was a long time ago, Jenny, a long time ago but were you always intrigued by it right from the start, was it just something that caught your attention and you just wanted to learn more about it or was there something specific that you just, the reason why you just dove in on it?
- Well, I think the benefit of hindsight, one residual red thread throughout my career is I love to solve problems and this was another problem to solve, it was like a mystery box that you could plug little things in and I could create little games and make them run. And when they didn't run, it was a problem that I had to then go back in and fix and I genuinely just loved it. And then it proceeded with the Dragon and then I was able to buy games, and that was very exciting so I wasn't just making games, I was playing games. And I think at the core it was solving problems, it was another problem to be solved and I've always loved those. I was the kind of kid who had, there was the famous five books which I'm sure some of us of our generation will remember. My mom would always buy me the famous five books, but with the dice involved in them, where you used to have to solve the problem yourself and it was kind of take you on a magical mystery tour. So you didn't read the book to learn it, I had to play a game to do it, and so I guess that's been a bit of a thread for me going through.
- And was that something that was influenced by your parents, that mindset, or was that something that you just instinctively had yourself?
- I don't know, my parents are both teachers. They were both elementary or primary school teachers in the UK, and so both of them were very sort of whatever we liked we would pursue. And so for me, I think it was probably a mix of it kept me quiet and kept me outta the way, and they just knew I loved all that stuff. I loved playing cards, I loved solving mysteries and board games and I think playing with computers was just another extension of that, so probably a mix. I mean, it did reach a point where my sister got a Barbie car, and I was never into Barbies or any of those things, but for me that became another science experiment. I would put things into it to see how fast I could run that Barbie car into the garage door, which all ended horribly when I put a brick in it and smashed the Barbie's car, and my parents then- Well, my sister was very unhappy, she actually only learned the truth about this a couple of years ago. But I was like, well, it went fast, I'd build myself a table of which, "How could I get the Barbie car to go quickest down the driveway?" And it turns out a brick in it really worked. So, yeah, it kind of slowed down a little bit after that.
- It's an interesting correlation that computer programmers and musicians are very often very good at both, and so I am not surprised to know that you have a Bachelor's of music and that you play piano, but I think it would surprise the general public to know how popular music is in the deaf community; so I'd love to hear your thoughts on both.
- Yeah, I love music, I actually spent this weekend at a... There's a local amphitheater here in Washington State called The Gorge, and I love going there and just feeling live music. There's something just so magical about it and I do get this question quite a bit, "How does a deaf person enjoy music?" I used to get this question as a kid 'cause I was in every orchestra, every band, Clarinetist, and I did go to uni to study music. And there were a lot of folks are like, "How, why, how?" And as a kid I would kind of flip it back and say, "Well, I don't know how you are learning music, I know how I'm doing it, and it's hard for you when you're, deafness is the only thing I've known, for me to comprehend how you are doing it. But for me, music is an all experience." I, again, read the music, I learn the music, I play it and play it, and play it. I take the speakers and I literally have them right here, I have them on me. In my music degree I had the utter privilege of meeting some of my heroes, including Evelyn Glennie, who is Scottish, percussionist and deaf, and ask her some of these questions. And I swear I remember doing that interview as maybe a 19-year-old kid, just completely melting 'cause she is the one who got me into music at eight years old, going to one of her concerts where she was playing flower pots. And she allowed me to touch the stage and touch the flower pots, so I could feel what was happening. And my deafness wasn't as bad then as it is now, but I think music is for all, it's just an all-out experience and I learned a ton from studying music. I learned discipline and teamwork, and things that are so important to what I do today, and so it really was the gift, was having the chance to spend a college degree investing in that and having a lot of fun in the process.
- I have to ask, do you still play the clarinet?
- I do, badly, of course. And I do teach piano a little bit, as and when I can, I've got some amazing students and I enjoy it whenever and however I can.
- Awesome. Are there any assistive technologies currently out there that either you use or you'd recommend as it relates to enhancing or optimizing that experience?
- Well, I'm seeing a lot of new technology come in for music. I was just looking this morning, Coldplay actually had at Glastonbury over the weekend, they had incredible all body suits for the deaf community, which is kind of exciting. I've tried some of those in the past, again, I think it's like anything, you have to spend the time to learn how to use those and how to take the stimuli in in a way that means that you get to not just process that, but enjoy that. And so I think that like anything, I think any new technology takes time to learn. My methodologies are probably old school, I sit and I literally learn the music, I learn the notes, I know every word to every song by the time I walk into a concert or I'm playing something, but I am seeing a lot more new inclusive methodologies and technologies coming into concerts and coming into music tuition, which I think is really important. And so, I mean, I can request a sign language interpreter for concerts, and most of the time it's fulfilled. And the fact that you can play your music and follow the words live, I think is in many ways the best assistive technology. I used to do that with smash hits, by the way, I used to buy the magazine and I'd be listening to Madonna "Like a Prayer" with my hand on the speaker and reading the words, and that was how I would learn the music. And so it's come a long way, but I think it's still got a long way to go.
- It's interesting, I've been really fascinated by the deaf community, it's a very rich cultural community that has so much nuance and so much, I don't know, richness I think is the word. And I would love if you could demystify it to some degree, because I think most people, unless they've been somewhat in the disability space, have absolutely no clue that it even exists. So what can you share with us?
- Oh, goodness. Well, there are people that have literally spent their careers investing, learning and leading the disability and the deaf community in particular, so I would never profess to be an expert, although I'm just one member of it. And I would really, really push folks to invest their time in following folks on social media, so deaf leaders, investing their time in looking at some of the academic studies on deafness. There is deaf studies, there is linguistics, but essentially deafness is like many parts of disability in some ways and different in others. It is a spectrum, there are folks who are born with deafness, there are others that acquire it through age, through accident, through illness. You move through from mild to moderate, to profound. My dad is in the mild category, he wears hearing aids. Occasionally, not all the time. My sister is in the moderate category, she wears two hearing aids, and when she takes them out there is no yelling at her, that's when she goes into her cocoon, and she relies on audio. I'm a little bit more in the profound category now, my deafness has slid, but because, again, I grew up with mild to- I do have voice, but I also, I understand what you are saying through sign and my interpreter, Mary, is on the call with us. And then you have other folks as their first language is sign. That is their language, it's not- and it's really important that deaf kids are given that opportunity to learn that language. And so you see folks here in the states using American Sign Language, in the UK using British sign language, and by the way those are very, very, very different languages. They each have their own beautiful history and linguistics and grammar that is very different to spoken English, either side of the pond. And so I think it's important to be respectful of that diversity within it, of that range of lived experience. I'm a big, big, big advocate of choice but, most importantly, I wasn't given the option to learn sign as a kid and in hindsight I wish I had been. I've told my family that, and I've been spending a lot of my later years really learning and being a part of the deaf community in a very different way. But there's one thing I would push is just every kid, when I was handed my baby and told, "Oh, it's good, your kid's not deaf." And I'm like, "Oh, I was kind of looking forward to having someone that I could..." It's not a bad thing to be deaf, it's a beautiful thing and every kid deserves to have the choice to learn sign as a part of how they operate and how they work.
- And-
- It's important to basic education, folks, it really is.
- Yeah, and something fascinating that I've been wondering about because I've heard this answer from some friends, do you think in sign language, what is it like to have a visual inner monologue, which some people do have?
- Well, again, you probably wanna ask folks whose first language is this? Again, I'm learning and this is not my first language, but I will say, from my personal experience, as I've changed over time and started to shift over time, and my reliance on speech and my reliance on voice processing consumes far more of my internal battery power these days. And so I'm finding that it's a lot harder for my energy banks to rely on this, and the hearing to deaf and back is... And I do find myself, as people are talking, changing the grammar structure and thinking about how would I express that and when I'm with my interpreter, whether it, or following someone, just the concert as one example, it's so easy, it's so beautiful, it's so logical and clear and it just makes sense for my world. And so it is different, it is different and I've seen that really change over time. But, yes, I would again, like push folks, "Go and invest in... One, go learn it and learn it from deaf tutors, learn it from people who are the experts, and invest in and go beyond." There are many, many academic courses in sign language everywhere in the world, and there's always a need for more people to learn sign, always.
- So, back in, I think it was January, 2016, you assumed the role of Chief Accessibility Officer at Microsoft. Can you walk us through, a, your initial thoughts around that, how you felt when you were offered the role and then had you like a plan right away that you were thinking about that you wanted to implement, or was it more of, "Assuming the role and I'll figure it out, I'll get it done."
- I love it, we're jumping from the '80s, we're kind of- We're jumping through, I love it. Taking me back, my gosh, it's eight years ago now and I've been in the company, it'll be 20 years in January at Microsoft. And so thinking back to 2016 and really 2015, which is when it was all coming together. I mean, Microsoft has been in accessibility a long time, it's been focused on accessibility in the '90s so I'm the second CAO, I'm not the first. I get that a lot, "You're the first." I'm like, "No, no, no. There was an amazing leader in this role prior," but coming into the role, we knew it had to, it really did have to change. And so I did come into this role with a lot behind me. I'd spent nine, 10 years building, forming, chairing our internal disability Employee Resource Group here, ERG, I'd been working for a few years on what we needed to do to elevate the customer experience for accessibility, I was also working on privacy and child exploitation and some really hard things at the time as well, but this was where my center of gravity had been for some time, so it was coming in with that. And also, I'd spent, candidly, a lot of time, Brad, when he called me in to offer me the role said, "Okay, I want you to take the job, but now I want you to go away and come back to me with what you wanna do with the job." So I did come in with a plan, and that plan had been approved and blessed and was really the result of conversations with about 65 people at Microsoft, and many members of the community. So I had spent a good few months talking, listening, really understanding where we were, was that good, was that bad, what was the right pivot, the right sort of shift that we needed to take to make accessibility just part of our culture in a very different way. So, yeah, I came in with that headwind, which was a gift because once you're announced into these roles, whoosh. Those first three months moved at I think triple speed. I think accessibility, by the way, I think I'm still moving at double speed. It is a very fast-paced and amazing role, as you know, it's complex, it's hard, it's important and it consumes every minute.
- Can you speak a bit to the culture? You were saying you came in and one piece of this is the culture change. How do you tackle something like that in an organization like Microsoft that has so many pieces to it, and so many people?
- Well, I think the first thing is to recognize you're one person and, in actual fact, I would say that this was more about getting the right team of people together, and a very narrow set of priorities in the beginning. I think the big shift that we took in 2016 was taking this from a technology only, and that was the only thing really that my predecessor, the scope of the role was slightly different, and then really changing that to what it is today. We moved it in the company, we moved it up, we moved it into a different part of the company that was empowered to work across. And so I sit in our corporate external and legal affairs team, CELA, and my peers run things like privacy and sustainability and human rights and democracy, nothing important what we're doing there. And so I'm in this place where we've all got these roles that are working across the now 220,000 people here that work at Microsoft around the globe, but we really did add a few things and so we added a deep focus on people. I'm working on how we hire, retain, train, skill talent into Microsoft. We added an area focused on policy, we added that a couple of years later. We really have been looking a lot at our employee processes, at the same bar of parity as our customer level processes, and looking at partnerships I think in a very important strategic way. So, again, there's only so much I can do as one leader, my team could do as one team. It's more looking at what can we do if we work with team Gleason, if we work with Be My Eyes, if we work with organizations in Africa . You can expand what you do learning with and through others, so, yeah, we did consciously take on a few additional things, we also said in the beginning, "We're not gonna do that right now." And we put it several things and said, "No, that's stage two, stage three." And we were quite methodical about that, which in hindsight was very hard, once you get energy, everyone wants to go but it was the right thing to do. And I did have a lot of support from leadership as well. I feel very, very lucky to have and be in a company where there's an incredible president that I roll up to, Brad Smith, the CEO was the previous exec sponsor of the disability ERG before he became CEO, Satya Nadella. We have incredible folks like Phil Spencer running gaming, Who's just the out there advocates for disability and accessibility. And so, again, this is not one person, one group, it was very much an all thing, which I think accessibility has to be.
- Yep, completely agree. I think having that senior support goes a long way, a long way. But can you share for the audience that you touched upon it a little bit, that scalability, scaling across so many teams, product teams, engineering teams, design teams, both from a educational and learning perspective and a commitment perspective. Were there any tricks or best practices that you executed that made a difference?
- Scale is a big thing and scale is very important. I think the first thing that we did was implement the Hub and Spoke model. And so, again, not realizing how important that was gonna be at the time, which is, I have a team of multi-disciplinary industry level experts, they're incredible and I just feel really lucky to work with them. Folks like Ann Taylor who joined us from the NSB and Erica Zelmanowicz who leads our training and she was also in industry before, so just great people who know their business. But in many ways more important than them is every team at Microsoft also has people that are assigned to work on accessibility, and they lead, they own it, they're accountable for it. And so the best way of thinking about that is that I maybe have the responsibility to know and lead our approach to accessibility for Microsoft, but I don't write Windows code, they do. And so having that right carrot and stick, that right accountability model between each of the teams I think has been incredibly important for us to scale. And I think, candidly, now as we go forward, one of the biggest things now, given that our inventory of products, websites and tools is honestly really big and growing and the pace is changing, is also how do we lean into tooling and how do we lean ourselves into AI to make our processes, our tools smarter, quicker, and do a lot of the work for us. So scale is actually one of my big, big pushes right now, is making sure that everything we do is thinking about the scale of what we do here at Microsoft.
- Shortly after you were named CAO, a product called Seeing AI came out which I thought was really cool, and so I'd love to speak about or hear you tell us about Seeing AI or any other really cool AI tools that you have, or that you're coming out with. You are welcome to announce anything over here, though I can understand if you have a...
- Nice try, Joe, nice try. Yeah, no for coming... It's interesting and I'm sure we'll be talking about AI here, coming in 2016 we already had immersive reader out there, which is a feature that's across a lot of Windows and office, primarily aimed at dyslexic audience. We had the adaptive controller coming out 2017 for gaming, which opened the door to disabled gamers, 400 million disabled gamers out there, by the way. Huge, huge density of users that really want and need that thought leadership, I'm seeing accessibility in gaming just in a great way. And, yeah, Seeing AI came out in the same year, Seeing AI led by Saqib, who is a blind developer. He lives here, he's also British, he now lives here in Seattle in Redmond and he built it alongside a great gang of folks in a Hackathon, in fact, a lot of these technologies, all of those I just mentioned came through the Hackathon process at the time. That app remains one of our core, most important apps for accessibility, it is aimed at blind, low vision, multi-channels to it, they're now weaving in the latest GPT and technologies coming through. But essentially the premise has remained the same, which is using AI to read text on a menu, understand the color of the outfit you're about to put on, potentially help with indoor navigation, identify people, "Where should I sit in a meeting room?" Just important insights that hopefully reduce a little bit of the cognitive load that just makes life more important, more easy to navigate around; so it's another tool in the toolbox for blind and low vision. And then we've seen clearly a lot of technologies come out since then. I think some of the big ones is Accessibility Checker, which used to be in a kind of Gringotts vault, menu somewhere in Office, and the team pulled it right next to Spell Check and made it so that as you're checking your spelling you can check the accessibility of your document, your PowerPoint, your Excel, whatever it may be. I think captioning and how that's been embedded now, it's now right where you have wifi, making it discoverable, easy to find. It's online and offline, so you don't need wifi to have captioning from your PC. It's embedded into Teams, in fact, it just launched over the weekend in PowerPoint, so you can just put your video into your PowerPoint on the web and have it captioned right there. I mean there's, captioning I think has been an incredible field of innovation, particularly through the pandemic. So yeah, there's always more coming out, Joe, you know that.
- Yeah, and I love so many of those features that you mentioned, great stuff.
- We at ServiceNow are in the process of ensuring that we work with and partner with as many people with different disabilities as possible, at every phase of the lifecycle. Can you talk a little bit about what you've done at Microsoft to hire, onboard and level up individuals with different disabilities?
- Yeah, that people pillar for us is very, very important, you've got to have... Well, somebody asked me the other day, "I don't have anyone with a disability at my company," and this was a company of 10,000 people. And my answer there was, "Yes, you do, they just maybe don't feel safe enough to self-identify." So every company will have people with disabilities. So I don't think it's just about bringing people in, I think it's about creating the safe space where everyone can see themselves, ask for what they need to be successful, be able to have the right conversation with their managers, with their peers, and feel empowered to bring that expertise, lived experience, to the fore. So our approach is not just about acquiring disabled talent, it's also about supporting disabled talent, and I would say we're always and continuously learning. Some of our early programs are now over 10 years old, so we've been hiring developmental and intellectual disabilities into Microsoft through some of our suppliers supported employment since 2013 and, of course, those individuals paid at least fair minimum wage. Again, it doesn't make logical sense to me that people with disabilities, it is still legal practice here to pay people with disabilities sub-minimum wage, 14C is something that we do not support and we would like to see removed in the US and other countries as well. We've been hiring folks through our autism and neurodiversity hiring program since 2015, and I think we've learned a lot through that, which is we were closing the door to neurodiverse talent. That was on us, the door was not open to that talent pool because our interview process didn't allow those individuals to show up with their strengths, and so by changing that process to what is now a four and a half day virtual Minecraft Academy, so, again, we we're hiring through gaming which is always fun. We've been able to allow that talent to show and then work with 50 plus companies to be able to share that talent in a very different way, so if you are applying to Microsoft, with your permission, we will share that resume. If we can't fulfill that role, we share it with other companies through the coalition, and share our best practices on that. And then looking at accommodations for all, so whether you are coming to Microsoft through normal channels or you're an employee with Microsoft that has acquired a disability, most people do come to our gang through accident and illness and age, making sure that those accommodations are available quickly, speedily, no cost, centrally paid for. And where we can, best practices from that are embedded into standard interview practice, so evaluating what can we do to make questions available in advance, which is probably one of the number one requests we get. So constantly learning, but the core principle is that you must have, to build inclusive, accessible products you must have people with disabilities at the core and fabric. And that means we must have people within Microsoft.
- Completely agree. What we've started doing at ServiceNow is, apart from trying to level up the volume, we kicked off what we call an employee volunteering program with individuals with disabilities. And inside the first three weeks we had 245 employees with disabilities volunteer to participate at different phases of the lifecycle to provide feedback. And that way, again, we can scale across our different products and different verticals, and we build that collaboration, which is pivotal.
- I have a question for you. I really would love to hear your thoughts on this, this is a bit of a thorny problem. It always bothered me, I always think about perspective the way different people, how they go through, let's say, a particular issue. And it always bothered me when captions would star out curse words, because a person that needs to use captions deserves to hear the word, even if it's a curse word or some concept that maybe the organization that is doing the translation might not feel comfortable with, but this feels almost like a human right. And yet, if you look at it from the perspective of the engineer who's coding up that captioning, it isn't yet 100%, it will probably never be 100% perfect, and I think that there's some fear about putting a curse word in somebody's mouth by accident. But I'd love to know what your thoughts are, because you sort of sit in both sides of it from the software development side and understanding the perspective of someone that is using the captions.
- Oh, yeah, as a female in her 40s, please don't asterisks out swear words. And in fact, I will tell you, the person that spoke the most to us about this was Marlee Matlin, and I had a text message, she's like, "Why? I..." That became inspiration for us to make sure that actually we have a filter profanity option in there, but by default if you actually go to Windows Captioning, which just built into Windows 11, and you go in there you'll see that there is a feature which is Filter Profanity. So, yeah, we don't do that. If somebody is speaking the word, I want to hear the word which I'm doing through captioning. I'm not hearing your voice, I'm following the words. And so, yeah, no more asterisks out when others can hear it. Where it is important and again, as a technology company that provides tools in the workplace, in education environments, at home, is we do have deep respect for colleagues and partners that are working in education. And there may be the need given that profanity is so endemic within culture, but not always appropriately used. There could be a very plausible reason as to why they would want a profanity filtered out, and so I think having it as a feature is very important. And there may be in some environments, some tools where that may be on by default but, yes, deaf people, we swear too. We're pretty good at swearing.
- So accessibility and Gen AI, we believe OpenAI just released a critic to ultimately reduce the mistakes for GPT 4's code output. Do you see anything similar coming, like Accessibility Critic GPT? And I'd love just to get your feelings overall about accessibility and Gen AI. It can be a polarizing discussion, some significant concerns and some people being very optimistic about it, but love to get your overall feedback as well.
- Yeah, AI, the topic of the hour and probably the decade. I think, like any new technology coming in, there is the potential to do harm and the obligation to protect against that, which we as Microsoft definitely feel across many different spectrums, accessibility and ableism clearly being on that list. And then there's the profound opportunity to extend benefits, and to innovate with and change paradigms through it. And I think, yeah, one of the things, I remember attending a session... well I got the ping which was about Bing, so this is going back to November, 2022, and I had to smile because actually one of the first products that I worked in at Microsoft was Bing, and I spent seven years with my dear colleagues and friends over there so I love that the first implementation was in Bing, that got me kind of excited. But then, good reminder, AI's not new. I mean, we just spoke about Seeing AI coming out in 2017. AI is is littered into products and has been for years, I mean, some of the earliest use of AI goes back to the 1950s. Elaine Feingold corrected me, I think it's 1956, that it goes back to. This new chapter is profound, though, and I think it's got some considerable benefits for accessibility, some of which we've started to tap, some of which I think will come through in the incoming months and years. And it's got some harm, so we have to make sure that whatever we build we are building to the same standards as before, it doesn't change those, we need to make sure that we are building UI/UX, all environments to be accessible and we're leaning on those principles of compliance as absolutely the minimum bar and go beyond that into usable and delightful. We then have to really delve into how do we protect against those harms, ableism is probably top of my mind for that and accessibility is part of how we approach responsible AI as a whole, and then we've got to really aggressively go after those innovation opportunities. People with disabilities are very early adopters of technology, for fairly obvious reasons. One of my first jobs was working on The Daily Mirror in London, and I worked on the help desk, on the IT help desk. And I said I was a little deaf at the time and they were like, "No worries, we're gonna see if we can find you a captioning phone, an automatic captioning phone." And this was early, go, let's hit the '90s, we haven't hit that decade yet. But clearly, the technology was, it was not ready, it was not ready. Through AI, I'm now using Microsoft Teams, I have captions, I have a transcript, I then have meeting notes. So if I join late, I can catch up at the end, I just have automatic meeting notes that I can see, I can edit, I can... And I have sign language view all in one spot without having to pay anything, do anything other than turn a feature on. I mean, that's how far we've come. Those are benefits, huge benefits. And why, one reason of many, why many members of the dis disability community are so invested in accessibility, invested in tech, because it is life-changing. And then you've gotta balance that, is making sure we do it right. What we don't wanna do is propagate ableism, and so those language models, and I'm talking to Joe who's an industry leader on this, but we have to make sure that those language models understand disability, the right usage, the wrong usage, and those guardrails are embedded now into all of our principles and operating standards, as one example of many. So, yes, it is balanced, but I'm quite excited about where it's going.
- And the timing of AI getting quite good at ASR I think it's gonna get better automated speech recognition. It was COVID kind of changed the game because there was a lot of people, a friend of mine, Richard Ray Lorenzo, with the LA City was really pushing hard for emergency messaging, having ASL and captions and it was, I think, really hard to get the message across until all of a sudden COVID hits and here you have this emergency messaging, all of these warnings about social distancing, and wherever you did not have those captions or ASL it was really scary situation. And also all of the virtual meeting apps, they suddenly had massive requests for accessibility and it just changed the game overnight. What was your experience in terms of that emergency messaging and do you have any thoughts on that entire situation and how it relates to AI?
- In that first month of the pandemic, well, we were all trying to figure out how to work at home. We had enormous requests and demand on our captioning, which is embedded into all of our communications platforms. Microsoft Teams, we were actually able to turn it on very quickly, overnight, to meet some of that demand and we saw demand grew 3,700% in that first month. So it wasn't just rhetoric, it was really measured usage. And then with that comes a lot more. I mean, it's AI-powered captioning and so you get a lot more insight into what's working well and what's not that can then increase the percentage accuracy of it, so what we've also seen is through that use, through that learning comes an even better quality based captioning, and a lot of feature requests. A lot of people who said, "Hey Jen, I want to see my name of who's speaking," that got added. "I want to see the placement being very clear," that got added. In fact, some of our deaf engineers and Swetha, who is a deaf engineer in Windows was like, "I need to see it in Windows, I don't want it just in communications platforms." And that's really where Windows Live Captioning came from, is a deaf engineer took it on herself during that time to really build it and champion it into the core of the Windows platform. So, yeah, a massive catalyst, and we're reaping the rewards of that today and continuing that journey. So, yes, I would say that was one of the more significant areas.
- You mentioned Satya earlier, CEO at Microsoft. I believe he nominated you and picked you as part of Wired Magazine's 25 people who will shape the next 25 years. On the grand scale of things, what should we keep an eye out for and what does your own vision look like, as much as you can share?
- I think the good news and the hard news, in many ways, is that technology is increasing in pace, in speed and in reach. Digital technology is now everywhere, not everywhere has the connectivity, the power, to use it effectively; and so I think we need to be looking globally at the use of digital technology, and globally at the use of accessibility. And so, I have hopes and dreams that accessibility in even the 101 basics that you and I are probably using every day becomes general use around the world, particularly in developing world, the global south. And so that means decreasing the size, the dependency on connectivity, that means making it readily available in mobile and offline devices quickly, easily, and making it so discoverable, easy to use, that anyone, a deaf person sitting in Malawi can pick up a machine and use it to meet her needs. And so, I do think that there needs to be a very profound focus on making sure that there is accessibility for all, and I'm seeing those right tracks. So just even with Windows, the biggest component with Windows and captioning that we've spoken about is the fact that it's available offline, and it's not dragging on your battery, it's not dragging on your GPU, and, the packet size, just getting that down to where we can then put those nuggets into everything. And so it isn't just somebody on a mobile being able to use it but it's just instantly on any screen, and so it becomes just ubiquitous in society. So I think that there's one component there that I'm definitely seeing and I'm hopeful for, because, again, there are so many people. I was in Malawi a couple of years ago using some of this early technology and I was pulled out the room and asked if what I had was witchcraft. And, well, we laugh but actually that's a very deeply woven question. They had never seen an individual like me empowered because of technology like that, and I don't want that to be an anomaly, I want that to be fair game, fair use, anyone, everywhere. And so that's very top of mind for me. I think the other component is removing barriers. And so when I look at what's possible with hardware now that is becoming now regular use where people with disabilities are part of the hardware and design and build process is absolutely part of how we design and build our laptops, mice, keyboards, I have low vision keyboards that have been designed with the community, I've got a specific mice for people with mobility, I've got track pads that work for individuals that are using a knob, that may be limb different. And so I think weaving people into design and build processes, I'm hoping to see as a standard, and then of course you've got where AI is going. My general big goal in life is to be able to walk into any environment, a supermarket, a conference, a classroom, and my kiddo's autistic and I'm deaf and I'm sure I'll be alongside someone whose vision's- but the room would understand and be able to accommodate what we need. And so the lights would go down, the music would come up, the captioning would appear, there would be an avatar that would actually have enough understanding of sign language to be able to display it appropriately, linguistically, and that it would present braille options, and others, if needed. And so removing those barriers to which we have to request in advance, two weeks before, and hope and a wish and a prayer that you get that sign language interpreter, you remove those barriers. So I aim for a world where technology can fill that need and empower every person no matter where they are. So, yeah, I get excited about it and I think we're ebbing in the right way, but I think we've got a lot of responsibility to shape it right.
- That's a beautiful vision. Yes, I like it, I like it.
- No pressure.
- And I love that you said witchcraft because it really feels like that sometimes, even if you understand how an LLM works, it still feels like magic, that it's able to actually respond in a way that seems to make sense, so that's pretty apt comment. Speaking about what's coming in the future and making things empowering, I've always been impressed, as soon as Satya Nadella took over as CEO I noticed those key acquisitions that he's done, and GitHub in particular was a really great one. And what's interesting is that GitHub has changed its mission and now is an AI first company, and the goal from what I understand is to create one billion programmers around the world. And I believe, but I'll open to you, that a lot of those programmers can be people with disabilities with all kind of disabilities and, I'm curious, do you feel like this is really something that is going to empower everyone to fully be able to really work in a big repo, build a really big project just using AI?
- Yes, I hope so. Joe, to your point, I mean, Microsoft is a big family, we have LinkedIn, GitHub, Activision Blizzards, so, yes, Candy Crush. And on top of what many people know, the Cloud, Azure, Windows, Office, Xbox. So it has got broad reach at this point and every part of that family has big implications for us, and I'm not just talking about making Candy Crush accessible. The potential with GitHub is to really, you just look at what's possible with GitHub Copilot and building accessible code just by building it, just by booking it, really is where we can shift left this industry and move out of a remediation and test environment into just building by design. I wanna be realistic, that's gonna take some time, but, yes, that is the all up, again, vision, zooming out for a second; building games accessible, inclusive by design empowering people going into careers through LinkedIn and LinkedIn Learning. And I absolutely love that one of the first things they did was make it so that you could actually add accessibility as not just a skill but as a career, they added all of our job titles into LinkedIn, which is very important it means that LinkedIn is validating this as a career, is propagating and accelerating it, and we also get some insights into how many folks there are out there in our world. And so, yes, I do think that in every part of the family there is the possibility of moving it forward, and the great thing is that each of them have also brought on incredible accessibility leadership, so in GitHub Ed Summers is the fantastic leader over there.
- Yes, good friend of mine so, yes.
- Our beloved Jenison assumption on LinkedIn, so-
- Yeah, is the lead over there and, again, we all work together as part of the Hub and Spoke, and so that is the gift for us is that we be able to work with one another and learn from one another. There's that essence of independence to be able to be creative, thoughtful, what works for you, your culture, which by the way is very different between LinkedIn versus Activision versus GitHub. So you do what's right for developers in GitHub, you're doing what's right for the workplace and the career pipeline in LinkedIn, so just very different nuances, which is exactly the same as how it works in Microsoft. One of the best things about working in accessibility is that you get to work with every part of the company. And it's very different, one meeting is with office and the next meeting is with Xbox, and very different culture and vibe and I love that. I smile. All day, every day, mostly.
- But that's a beautiful thing about accessibility, not only does it give you the opportunity to work truly across your organization, but there's very few disciplines or skills, or departments, that with yourselves, Microsoft, with SAP, with Oracle, that collaboration around, "What we're doing, how we want to grow together, how we want to do the right thing." You don't get that in too many other areas, but you do get it in accessibility and it's an awesome thing, it really is.
- Right, and it's not just within our own company, it's we all work together as well. Yeah, I remember when you came into the role, it was like, "Okay, what you need?" It's an important thing and I love that there's kind of a, there are times when we all compete, of course, within any industry but really not within the realm of accessibility, there's a lot of support for one another.
- No, and as we wrap up 'cause I know you're extremely busy. I just wanted to thank you, Jenny. When I assumed this role just over two and a half years ago, and you were one of the first people I reached out to and right away you give me your time, we spoke a few times since so, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for your collaboration, thank you for your insight and your feedback. It means a lot, it really does, so thank you.
- Right back at you. Yeah, we're all a family, right Joe?
- I mean, and-
- Absolutely.
- I absolutely love that Mr. Devon here and Jenison, and we all follow what they do 'cause they created GAAD, so-
- Thank you.
- We're all dependent on one another and need one another if we gonna accelerate and advance this thing.
- Absolutely, and thank you again for joining us. This was really wonderful and, hopefully, we will do it again soon.
- Well, thank you for having me. Have a beautiful rest of your day.
- You too.
- You too.