Unlocking innovation through disability inclusion, with Microsoft’s Hector Minto - Episode 6

Episode 6 • 16th November 2023 • Made For Us • Tosin Sulaiman

HM 0:00

People think that Microsoft comes and talks to you about productivity and security and privacy and all those great things right? But when our sellers are going in and opening the door on a conversation around disability, that's the impact we can have. I mean, that's it right there.

TS 0:16

Welcome to Made For Us, a podcast about the intersection of innovation and inclusion. It's for anyone who's curious about how to develop products that work better for all of us. I'm your host, Tosin Sulaiman, a podcaster, and former business journalist. Each week, I'll be speaking to entrepreneurs and leaders from some of the world's most inclusive businesses, who will be sharing the how the watch and the why of inclusive design. My guest this week is Hector Minto, Microsoft's lead technology evangelist on accessibility. For the last seven years, Hector has worked with Microsoft's customers and partners advocating for disability inclusion, and driving adoption of its assistive technologies. In this conversation, Hector tells me how inclusion has given rise to numerous innovations of Microsoft. You'll also hear Hector's take on how disability inclusion can add value to a business. If you like this episode, please share it with someone who might find it useful, or share it on your team Slack channel with your biggest takeaways. Now, here's the interview with Hector Minto.

HM 1:14

I'm Hector Minto. I'm the Lead technology evangelist for Microsoft on accessibility. So disability inclusion through technology. I joined Microsoft seven years ago, pre Microsoft, I've worked in the field of disability technology, so assistive technology for about 22 years before Microsoft so yeah, it's kind of all I've ever done. I only talk about disability in tech.

TS 1:34

Yeah, I was curious. So what first sparked your interest in this space.

HM 1:38

So I spent a lot of time as a kid with my mother that was a teacher in adult education. So she actually she worked in prisons, but she also worked in adult education in the community. And I'll be totally frank with you, I was kind of dragged in to support some of her lessons, you know, hand the books out work with some people. And obviously, I've started working with people with learning disabilities in, in my community in the in the southwest of England, and just got, I would honestly say super confident around disability is like, you know, that might sound kind of quite difficult for people to understand. But actually, that's one of the biggest challenges we have around engaging on the topic of accessibility is people are just a bit nervous about disability, and kind of understanding the challenges and issues that people have.

So I was I was kind of pulled in to support learning as a very, very young man as a teenager, and I went to university I kind of carried on, you know, did my did a chemistry degree, believe it or not, and then I was just kind of itching a little bit, I think, to kind of get back into sort of human impact. And so found a job working for a very small company in the in the south of England, selling assistive technology, working with people who had physical disabilities, turning pages on books, we had vacuum pumps attached to car aerials, turning pages on books back in the 90s, didn't really exist anymore. I just I was always intrigued with how we could apply technology or just apply learning and technology to the lives of people with disabilities. And I still say it to this day, when I meet CIOs of some of the biggest companies around the world. Once you get into this topic, it's kind of super addictive. It's like, you know, meeting human challenge and applying technology to meet human challenges is a really cool topic. So yeah, well, I think once you're in, you're in.

TS 3:18

And just to go back to you helping your mom out in the school, what was it about that experience that that stayed with you?

HM 3:26

You know, you meet new groups of friends who've got different lived experiences to what you're seeing on a daily basis, and the challenges are different. So you know, I think if you go through mainstream score, quite often you sort of get everyone's kind of, you know, tackling many of the same issues in terms of learning and accessing. But when you see something that is like, very specific, and intriguing, and problem solving, in terms of the access that somebody has to something, so that's a great topic, but fundamentally, it's human contact, isn't it? It's like, you know, to humans, me, and you know, you want to kind of get through the challenge together. I think that's always been my approach to this. When I apply that to assistive technology, my main job honestly, for the for the 20 years before Microsoft was the person meeting the person with the disability to solve the challenge of access to the thing. So whether it was access to reading, access to communication, computer access, access to gaming, I was the person working out how we needed to tweak that solution specific to that human. And so is, is fundamentally problem solving, which like we all love, the concept of like solving a challenge and someone's challenge.

But I've always said to people, there's friendship underpins this, you know, human contact and friendship should underpin what we're trying to do through this. And some of the most amazing bosses that I've had in my career are people with disabilities who invented their own technology for themselves. My role with them was always like, how do we scale this? Like because and I think that's the biggest challenge still, to this day with Microsoft is I still meet people every day who do not know what we've built into our technology. And so So problem solving and friendship and just human contact and you know, just just that that guttural problem solving aspect of it intrigues me. My favorite topic now, though, I'd say is really how do we how do we actually start reaching more people with this? That's, that's the biggest challenge we've got.

TS 5:14

And I understand in the roles that you had before Microsoft working with emerging technologies that you worked with Stephen Hawking?

HM 5:21

Yeah, I've worked for a number of different companies. I actually met Stephen Hawking, working with a separate piece of technology to the one that he's famous for, first of all, so actually, I'm sure you're familiar with the with the communication aid he had in front of him, you know, the, the DOS computer screen that was kind of, it's kind of there in front of him on that on his wheelchair. That was fine. But he couldn't use it on flights. He lost his voice and his ability to communicate while he was on flights. And you know, being Stephen Hawking, he was constantly back and forth between the US and UK and around the world speaking at events. And so he needed a voice while he was on flights. And so I was working with him with a product called Light writer, to make sure that you had at least a backup for his communication when he wasn't there. But through meeting him, I then actually started working for the company who built the main device. And so I was constantly back in with him all the time going, as his condition changed, and his needs changed. I was the person going back in and working with his team to find the right switch.

I don't know if you've, you're familiar with how he used his technology, but essentially had a blink switch there to choose the letters as they were highlighted. I was in there, you know, literally on my knees next to his wheelchair, tweaking, you know, bending the cable around and making sure we were getting the right reflection. It was one heck of an experience. I mean, of course, I mean, as a young, a young professional, to have that exposure to somebody who was kind of on the world stage. Also, what was made me feel like we were going in the right direction with this right. You know, that was a good career. I talked to people at parties and everyone was like, what you're doing with Stephen Hawking was, was kind of, you know, made me feel quite proud as a as a young guy, right. So yeah, that was fun. I mean, like, my favorite story if you just to just to share with you, I don't know if you can see, but I've got my little mini Stephen looking behind me on my thing. My my Simpsons character. Okay, cool. Yeah. So he famously had that on his desk in his office, and I was chatting to once satellite, like all the things that you would have on your, on your table, you've got your your, your, your Simpsons character there. And he said to me, he said, Hector, he goes, that is how I've connected most with the general public, you know, of all the things I'm proud of stuff. This connected me with the general public. Listen, this made me mainstream, relevant. And I just always loved that actually have a collection of these now I kind of I went on eBay and kind of just bought them all up. And occasionally, you know, I'll kind of give them to a friend for a special special moment or something. Yeah, that was fun. Let's say it was quite inspiring as a young professional, actually was able to kind of get into his code as well, and program macros in his code and justice keyboards and all sorts of it, it was, it was a super fun part of my career.

TS 7:49

Sounds like a great experience. Can you talk about why you decided to join Microsoft? And just a little bit more about what your role entails?

HM 7:58

Sure. I mean, it was very deliberate. You know, as I say, you once you get into accessibility, and you know it, once you get in, you're in, okay, it's then like, how much impact can we possibly have? Really, if I'm totally blunt, mainstream tech companies, were always kind of a bit of a challenge to us working on specialist technologies, we were either too small or insignificant, or the big companies wouldn't bend for us, when we were trying to personalize their technology for our users when we were when we were building assistive technology. So we'd always had contact into Microsoft. But you know, there was a moment when Microsoft really kind of put out some public statements about their ambitions, on accessibility. And I genuinely felt like I was listening to myself about this has to go mainstream. Like, this is not a niche topic anymore. The more that society digitally transforms - our banking, our retail, our education, our healthcare - it's inconceivable that it cannot include people with disabilities. It's just inconceivable. And so even if people are watching this now, and just thinking, this is still a niche topic, assistive technology, it is not, you know, go into any post office, any bank, any store on a Monday morning and see who's there, using the traditional delivery method. It's often people with disabilities out there in society, who can access the digital.

And so honestly, the reason I joined was it was an impact ambition. You know, we there's so many of us at Microsoft who are kind of mission oriented. And you know, certainly within our accessibility team, it's like, we talk a lot about, you know, it's almost like activism, in a way. But there are very few companies that have the convening power that that Microsoft has, just in my seven years, you know, I'm talking to governments, the biggest brands around the world, we're talking international events, we're meeting the technology sector where they are, and I couldn't have dreamed of meeting those people, pre Microsoft, but with my experience in the real lived experience of people with disabilities, just trying to kind of access technology. You know, it was just the perfect moment for me, and the shift now, just to be clear, There will always be the ways that people with disabilities use their technology. So blind people will use screen readers, people with physical disabilities will use switch access or eye control or, you know, in alternative access methods. Now, the next challenge is, is the industry infrastructure supporting people, it kind of almost like people with disabilities will use their technology, their buttons, their gadgets, their cooltech. But that's irrelevant that they have access, unless the infrastructure, the websites, the apps, the tools, the data is representative of people with disabilities.

So to me, I kind of felt like I'd done 20 years working on the, on the human interface side of it, and you know, that not done. But that's that's kind of where it is right now. The next challenge is to scale through industry, but also to get really into kind of, you know, the, the uglier part of technology, which is that infrastructure that underpins society. You know, a company can have all the intent at once around inclusion, but if a blind person cannot access that front end to their banking, that's it, that's locked out. So the reason I joined us was, I could really see it was real, that the tech sector and it wasn't just Microsoft, actually, to be to be clear, but you know, Microsoft really appeals to me in terms of the the convening power they have, but it's really all about, like, if we're really going to make a difference out there. Let's get experts in assistive technology out there influencing the industries that we work in.

And that's really what my job is. To answer your question, I run a program within within our accessibility team, which is customer facing, partner facing and tech sector facing. So I'm essentially there to build confidence of our customers to start their journey on disability inclusion, or to support their existing journey, and with our partner ecosystem around the world to get all technology companies to understand they've got to build it accessible. So there's a lot of kind of advocacy, activism again, I would say, but also just education and learning and familiarity and confidence. You know, you asked me, like, what did I take from going to my mum's classes? I mean, you know, confidence, it's just confidence, you know, it's being willing to ask the difficult questions, once you get to know somebody. I think a lot of the work that I'm doing with CIOs and CTOs around the world and HR professionals around the world is, it's just getting them to kind of feel a little bit less nervous about having the conversation about what works and what doesn't work, recognizing it and making progress. And it's been amazing. I mean, honestly, it's been, it's been so heartening to meet professionals from around the world, who have no kind of skin in the game, essentially, you know, they're not waking up thinking about disability inclusion. But when we get them and light the topic up with them, they suddenly start going, we can do something here. Yeah. And we've had some amazing experiences with customers in the seven years still so much more to do, I think certain countries and markets have kind of made much more progress than others, you know, I'm going to be here for a while. This is not this is not going to be solved anytime soon. But yeah, this has been good.

TS: 12:58

So what have been the milestones in the in the past seven years that you've been doing this job? What would you say have been your your big wins?

HM: 13:04

So as I say, I work more with our field, what we call our field, you know, the customer facing employees. I think my proudest moment, we roll out voluntary training on disabilities, we have a badge to learn about accessibility. And I don't know how you what you're kind of feeling is about kind of training at work. But you know, not everybody enjoys taking their training, right. So you know, some of it is kind of forced upon us. Some of it's voluntary, but very little, in my experience, getting people to do voluntary training is a bit of a lift it for a lot of organizations. Unbelievably, we made the training so cool on accessibility, so human focused, but then also actionable, that over 50% of Microsoft sellers around the world took that qualification voluntarily. And then that gave us permission to flip the switch and make it mandated learning for everybody. So as it stands today, every single employee at Microsoft has to take disability and accessibility training, you essentially learn three things, what is disability? What tools do people with disabilities use? And how do you build an accessible experience, and you might be a lawyer, a marketer, product designer, or a tester doesn't matter, you understand that you can have an impact on the lives of people with disabilities. So that was the moment where we realized we were really onto something that that there was enough appetite amongst customer focused employees to take that training. We then flipped the switch on it. And what we've now been able to do is now go and roll out those similar programs with our customers. So we now have customers around the world who are taking the Microsoft training, and rolling that out to their employees to gain that confidence, and to kind of, you know, make progress themselves. So that's been huge.

New technologies have been built in new industries. I mean, that excites me massively. You heard me talk about the infrastructure side of things. But, you know, we've made some super geeky nerdy technology that's amazing for people with disabilities, but then other industries have taken it and said, Oh, hang on, we need to be in there. So it was a good example last year, we have an app called Seeing AI, which is designed by an amazing, blind dev called Saqib, who essentially built the app that uses AI to narrate the world for him, it recognizes faces, it recognizes barcodes, colors of clothes, reads text straight off document reads handwriting, amazing. But Haleon, essentially the consumer health care company, who built so many of the brands that you're familiar with, from Voltarol, to Centrum to, trying to think what the other ones were, essentially, consumer health care products, Chapstick was the other one, they essentially looked at it and went, we could put health care information in here for people who are blind. And that's what they did. They took the product, and they put their barcodes up into it. And they worked with us to make sure that the information that was reaching people who are blind, low literacy, low vision, were using this app to have a better healthcare experience. Like that only happens because we unlocked the door through our field teams going to have a conversation with our customers about disability. I mean, people think that Microsoft comes and talks to you about productivity, and security and privacy and all those great things, right. But when we're our sellers, are going in and opening the door on a conversation around disability, that's the impact we can have. I mean, that's it right there. That really, really excites me.

And actually, just as an example, as a kind of an add on to that example, that's not regulated. Okay. So that's not a law that they have to do that in the healthcare industry. The laws are around, make sure that make sure the information's on the box, Braille were required in certain markets. But nobody says you've got to create a really easy, delightful experience for your customers, that company chose to do that in partnership with Microsoft. And so when I think about kind of what I'm most proud of is where we got people, without having their arm twisted by their back, to go and say, I want to do some inclusion stuff, you know, we want to create cool new inclusive products, and then actually go and tell the market that we're doing it, you know, impact our brand representation, change how people feel about us, as a business, help our staff to feel proud of the company that they work for. There are so many different aspects of where this topic adds value to a business. And that's, you know, I didn't know that before I arrived at Microsoft if I'm honest, right, you know, I just thought I was gonna go and kind of tell people about disability, tell them about accessibility. It's only since having been in the business for seven years, I've started to realize we really can have impact, but not just do it for the ROI, you know, do it because it excites everybody. And people actually want to do this stuff.

TS: 17:26

And then this goes a long way back in terms of disability inclusion and accessibility at Microsoft. I'm just curious how it all started. Was it employee-led? Did it come from the top?

HM: 17:37

Way back, it started with Bill Gates making a commitment to trusted computing. Yeah, there was this thing that Bill Gates said, let's make sure we get a computer on every desk in the country, you know, to every desk in the world. I mean, we've we've moved past that, right? We know wake up with our technology. But as part of that, trusted technology was a big topic. And some of the first investments in Windows, things like sticky keys for one handed typing and basic magnification was starting to be built into the operating system. At that point, it was kind of very much leadership led, technology led, but what's happened over the last say, you know, 20 years, but you know, really, I'd say kind of crystallizing in the last seven or eight years, is disabled employee led impact on the strategy for Microsoft. And, you know, our accessibility team is led by employees with disabilities. Our Chief Accessibility Officer, Jenny Lay-Flurrie, is a person with a disability. What we did is we kind of pulled the streams together. So there was always HR and people initiatives around disability inclusion and representation. And then there was also product design and regulation, meeting regulations for, you know, mitigating legal risk on product around things like accessibility, but there was no cohesive plan between the two in you know, back in the 90s. It was kind of two different streams, essentially, think of it like that, as we've brought those streams together, confidence has just rocketed.

So when you're focusing on kind of product design with regulation, you design to minimum bar, everyoone would. You design to what the regulator's asked you to do, but when you bring people with disabilities into the mix, they kind of go well, we could do so much more. You know, and so what we're starting to see with our product design, and in the way that we talk about ambition in disability inclusion on products at Microsoft is is moving towards delight. You know, we're moving towards like, what are the delightful experiences that you as a person with a disability would expect from your from your product experience here. So when you look at some of the things like the Xbox adaptive controller, which adds switch access to the Xbox, or the reading capabilities in edge to support dyslexic, low vision reading, that's way beyond regulation. Like there's no regulator that says you have to have a dyslexic friendly reader, in your browser experience, no regulation in the world is saying that, but the representation of people with disabilities and the ambition they set for us in terms of what our products can do and what's possible with new technologies, cloud, AI, multimodal input. When you add all of this into the mix, people with disabilities are the experts as to kind of just how far we can push this, you know, what could we deliver? What could we actually do?

And also there, you know, what we found is that people with disabilities woven into the team. So this is not one team at Microsoft, you know, this is about representation woven in everywhere within the business. People with disabilities are saying, how do we improve? How do we take, everyone wants to be proud of the thing they build, whether it's a process or a product, but the confidence to talk about it, the underpinning of knowledge of every employee on disability, and then safety in voice and culture to kind of say what you want to happen. That's what's unlocked some of the magic moments. And that's pushing us, you know, we still got to meet regulations. I mean, there's no, absolutely no getting away from that. But the thing that motivates us, and the thing that motivates and keeps momentum going, is the delightful experiences, the surprising experience, there's the Wow, Microsoft did that? You know, when we added the Surface Adaptive Kit to Surface so people with limited mobility could open their Surface, these thin edges on laptops, open them up with lanyards, and delivered them mainstream on our websites next to the product, the disability community were coming to us and saying, I can't believe you did that. I can't believe you actually got it done. Yeah, that is only because we've got people with disabilities driving the agenda through the organization. So essentially, think of it to summarize, we brought our kind of technology and regulatory stream, together with our people stream in a kind of a joint cohesive strategy.

TS: 21:30

And I'm curious where data fits in in all of this as well. I mean, how much of it was informed by data in terms of, you know, the impact of product inclusion and the impact of exclusion?

HM: 21:41

Yeah, so you got to be quite careful here. You'll see lots of research around disability. So there's things like the click away pound, if your website is not accessible, people with disabilities will click away, or what's the size of the Purple Pound, we say in the UK here quite often, like what's the spending power of people with disabilities? The thing we've got to be careful with there is people disabilities are spending their money. There's not this, this reserve that's sat there waiting for people with disabilities to spend their money. But they will come to you if your product works for them, and they will bank with you if your website is accessible. The pandemic was super interesting in terms of retail and just groceries, like it became very clear that people weren't really using a lot of those digital platforms. But suddenly, people with disabilities were forced to use those digital platforms. And suddenly, well, you know, those that were accessible won the business.

So there is there is that kind of market research, the size of the population that just honestly, the sheer demographics of disability, but people with disabilities are finding their way around. So people shouldn't get caught up of like, this is a whole thing of net new money, net new business. It's much more market share. The thing I would argue and the thing that we argue is if you only chase the ROI, how many X number of customers, extra customers will we get, that's difficult to prove. Because they're going somewhere already, right. But if you add in the culture, if you add in the inclusive design principles and the innovation side, and you know, the blurred background in Teams that was designed for disability, so Microsoft was the first company in the world to give you the privacy filter, but the privacy filter was designed for lip reading, right? It was designed for the deaf experience. But when we went out to sell Teams as the first to market with the privacy filter that you could blow your background. And everyone went, Oh, yeah, that's important to us as a business. But we want, you know, you know, on a lot of companies were going to us and saying, Yeah, of course, we need this. And of course, the rest of the market followed. But we were first to market with it. And it came from disability. So it's not just about designing the disability experience specific to a group of people with that specific disability. The concept of design for one and extend to many, find great inclusive design wins, that's part of it.

And then there's also this purpose. So if you think of the costs of recruitment, the cost of retention, the cost of culture, within a company the size of Microsoft, you know, like, we're big, you know, a lot of budget is spent on retention, and recruitment, and all these sorts of things. There's this concept of brand and purpose that has value to all businesses. People stay with companies that have purpose. People want to go and work on purpose projects secondary to their other role, people want to take part in our ability hack each year, to go and work on a specific project across multi disciplines and work on something that's going to lead to changing the world and including people with disabilities. So there's the product win and I'll come just let me come back to the kind of winning business on disability inclusion, all those sort of things, the pure ROI. But before you get to the pure ROI, please think about the wider ROI to your organization in terms of the culture, your HR, your attention, your purpose, all those things, and your surprise wins. Again, I could take so many surprise wins that have come from disability inclusion and Microsoft. Let's talk quickly about the ROI on specifically on accessible technology because that has to be important here. So there are regulations coming through all across the world where technology is going to have to be accessible. So the European Accessibility Act means that mainstream technology like ours is going to have to be accessible. It also means ATMs are going to have to be accessible everywhere, point of sale systems and retail going to have to be accessible ticket machines in train stations, that's been in the UK news recently, right? That's going to have to be accessible. Yeah. So the companies that build those accessible products are going to have regulatory frameworks that support them winning business. And the ones that don't do it will be left behind. Okay. So that's good governance, good policy from governments where they're starting to recognize accessibility is a deliverable and we demand it. The public sector has been first off, so any, anybody selling into public sector has to sell accessible technology into public sector. But the trend we're now monitoring across the world now is that across many more industries, we're starting to see regulation start to apply to them.

The trick here, or the strategy here is that companies are going to have to get on the front foot on this. Yeah, and human history or business history will tell you, those that sit and wait to be told to do it are going to get left behind those who jump through. So if you look at kind of, you know, the challenger banks who have suddenly won so much consumer business, what won them the business, usability. 100% usability. You know, I remember when I won't say which bank I joined. But when I joined my challenger bank, and I logged in, and I scanned my face, and I put my passport in, and the whole thing was fully accessible. It genuinely delighted me, and I must have told 200 people, so there's that, you know. Don't wait for the regulators to tell you to build a modern digital, inclusive, accessible experience that includes people who can't read or have low vision, or hard of hearing. The regulators do eventually catch up as well. So I don't know if you know this, but things like Teams, you know, I won't mention the others, but you know, Teams and its competitors. If you want to sell a video conferencing platform, it must have captioning. Now, that was not the regulation six months ago, that's brand new regulation that's come through. The regulators catch up on what's possible for accessibility and the technology as well. And then they start adding it into your industry as well.

So the history of Microsoft says we've always had regulation on accessibility, and we've always met it at varying levels through the years, the confidence and the competence to deliver it over the last six or seven years, has ramped up massively. And backing this up is understanding of people with disabilities across the world, that those experiences can be more accessible. And the trend that I'm projecting moving forward, so many more industries are going to have to be good at this. I can tell you one more story, just a customer story, just the one that I learned about the other day, and I give them a plug. But Shell gas stations around the world, they have an app called Shell Go now where if you're a wheelchair user, you can go on and find the fuel station that will essentially allow you to get service. And then you can essentially order your fuel, pay for your fuel pay for other goods from the comfort of your car, and then drive off. That's amazing. And it was disability that drove that. But who else is gonna want that? People late at night might want it, mums who don't want to leave, parents who don't want to leave their kids in the car while they go into the station. You know, all of that we've all been there. But essentially, they built a beautiful accessible experience. But it came from accessibility. So seriously, I'm saying that there's always going to be the regulatory picture. And that's going to change and affect more industries. But the winners will be the ones who just jumpe ahead and just kind of go, hey, we want to do this because we want to do this. And we're also thinking about the inclusive design wins.

TS: 28:45

So you talked about Microsoft's products inclusion principles, can you give an overview of what those are?

HM: 28:52

Essentially, there's regulation underpinning everything. So first things first, minimum bar, what are the regulations? And what are your requirements as a product designer, to make sure that we're we're meeting regulations, so we're transparent on regulations. So anyone buying a Microsoft product around the world, particularly an enterprise, they can see the conformance against accessibility standards of Microsoft products. That doesn't mean that products are 100% accessible, and products are always changing. And there's new products coming out all the time. But essentially, transparency is absolute first. First principle is transparency. Beyond that, what we've recognized over time is that we've got to move to a model of inclusive design. So when you design from a wider group of perspectives, and specifically around disability, you'll start to get those wider wins, like I mentioned. You know, the blurred backgrounds, an easy one for people to remember. Alright, so there's the regulation, but then there's also this wider groups of perspectives, wider variety of human experiences, people with low literacy, people with lower cognitive abilities. People with mental health disabilities, all of these personas essentially are kind of contemplated as part of design sprints. And then it's about delivery, you know, and designing those those delightful deliverable experiences. That's an investment from us, by the way. So, you know, like any big organization, there's turnover, people are coming from other companies coming into Microsoft, people are building product, new product teams are spun up, the things that we teach them are, first things first, legal requirements. But then what we're doing is we're investing through our head of inclusive design, run education sessions, we have learning platforms, and digital learning available for all of our designers to essentially start recognizing the benefits of that inclusive design process.

And the one other thing we do, and it's a bit of a techie thing. Is we democratize accessibility testing. So a lot of organizations have accessibility teams that will do their accessibility testing. And they're kind of a bit of a central cohort of individuals who do it. What we've now done, we've open sourced our accessibility testing solutions. So essentially anybody in any team can test the product they've built for accessibility. And we put an expectation out there that everyone should be able to do one on one accessibility testing. So, you know, don't send it to the specialists until you've done the basics. So if you, just so you know, there's an accessibility checker in office. You can check a PowerPoint or you can check a document for accessibility. We should all as human beings have level 101 accessibility testing. When you do the social media posts for your podcasts, it's up to you, whether you make them accessible or not. It's your choice by adding the alt text on any images by captioning videos. That mentality is what we're driving out through the design teams of. You've got to do the testing first. Okay. So democratizing testing, and then the kind of the expert testing, the human testing follows afterwards.

TS: 31:39

And I wanted to go back to Teams and the adaptive controller. So with Teams, you talked about the blurred background, but can you talk a bit more about how that came about? So it wasn't initially about security, if I understand correctly?

HM: 31:51

So it actually started in Skype, believe it or not. Swetha's an amazing engineer at Microsoft. She's deaf. That's basically lip reading. Multiple screens with lots of different people, you know, 12 people in a meeting and all with different backgrounds and catching the face that's talking and lip reading is hard. And so what they designed, they designed the blurred background to allow focus on lips. I mean, essentially that was what it was. So it's very easy to jump between three or four different people and catch the lips quickly while you're a lip reader. That was the basic concept. It's not simple to do, by the way. I mean, if people want to play with the blurred background. Turn your head upside down while you're doing it, kind of, you know, go upside down and see how the AI suddenly gets confused. But she did it just for lip reading. And then, of course, it came into Teams. She's the same engineer who's also got us Windows 11 offline captioning now.

So you can now have captioning anywhere in Windows on any platform. better captioning than some of the platforms are already providing when you turn on the Windows captioning. She went and did that as well. I mean, she's, she's incredible, but essentially that was what it started for was that. We talk about the captioning, the big trend now for Teams is transcription. I mean, with Co-pilot coming, you know this concept of gen AI, generative AI, and all these amazing tools that are going to be, productivity tools are going to be built into Office and Teams and much more widely than that. But essentially, if you think about it, it's fundamental to that Teams meeting that you have good transcription. And what is transcription? It's captions. But the driver, the early adoption, the reason we were miles ahead in terms of captioning at the start, yeah, was because of disability. And now as we move into a world where you're going to join a meeting late, this still scares me that you're going to do this. You're going to be able to join a meeting 20 minutes late and go into the Co-pilot in Teams and say, can you just give me five bullet points of what I've missed? And because of good transcription, it's going to give you what you've missed. But what was the building block? Good captioning. Solid, solid, good captioning that is accurate. Yeah. Okay. And that came from disability.

So, so all this is coming. We've done so much more. You've got dyslexia in the chat or dyslexia support in the chat in Teams. You've got sign language interpreter view. So no matter what content people share and people are very messy and teams meetings, you know, a bit screen share here, turn off a PowerPoint presentation, move into an Excel live spreadsheet. People are jumping around all over the time in Teams. You have a consistent sign language interpreter feed. If you're deaf and need sign language interpretation in Teams now, that's been added. You can now take the slides at your own pace. If your reading's slower than somebody else, uh, you have automatic high contrast view of the, of, of screen presentation of PowerPoint presentation. You can translate somebody else's slides into your first language. I mean, it's like, these are such cool tools, but it all came from inclusion, you know, more than disability, but you know, language inclusion as well. But inclusion was the driver for so many of those innovations that came through the product.

On the Xbox, just to kind of jump, I mean, that's just a passion project, right? It's really unique assistive technology delivered by Microsoft. I mean, it's the first time we've built something that is a disability product, right? So you can buy an Xbox Adaptive Controller that allows you to plug in a whole array of switches, joysticks, touchpads, to essentially build your own rig. So the easiest way for people to remember this is, let's say you had a Accelerate and Brake on Forza. But you could manage the top buttons, but you couldn't reach under to kind of press the levers on an Xbox Statue controller. You can use a mainstream controller for everything else, and then have accelerate here and break here on your head with switches. This by the way is no different to what Lewis Hamilton is doing. He's got all sorts of buttons and things in his helmet and stuff that he's using, right? So essentially what we're saying is build your own rig, whether you've got a disability or not. And so the Abox Adaptive Controller was born to create this customizable experience for the controller. The beauty of it the thing that I love most is that the games authors all got behind it. Essentially, this Xbox Adaptive Controller sparked a whole load of other commitments across the industry beyond the controller. And so now we've got games developers putting in new accessibility features. They're not perfect, but they're putting in more and they're investing their time. And that whole industry, that whole experience is just becoming increasingly more accessible.

TS: 36:14

And what impact has the Xbox Adaptive Controller had internally? You know, Microsoft has also gone on to develop other products, you know, specifically for disabled people.

HM: 36:24

I often say to people, innovation sparks more innovation. I mean, that's obvious, right? It's not just, that's not just a technical conversation. That's a people conversation. So when other people see people being celebrated for the amazing inclusive product they've built, people get competitive. I want to do my bit. I want to try. So I want to, what can I do in my team? And that's just human nature, especially in high performing organizations. You know, competition’s a super good thing. And honestly, what Xbox adaptive controller did from my perspective was really kind of got buy in from senior leaders, from product owners, from product designers, to kind of, you know, put their bit in. So it was really Microsoft's first foray into hardware accessibility. So what it led to was things like the Surface Adaptive Kit with the lanyards for opening the laptops, the tactile bumpers for keys on your, on your laptop if you've got low vision or you're blind, to identify different keys. The packaging for Xbox Adaptive Controller is super easy to open. But that same packaging in terms of being easy to open and a beautiful experience for opening the box. If you buy a mainstream Surface device, you get exactly the same experience now. I mean, it is gorgeous opening a Surface box for the first time that came from disability.

So what it led to was a whole, a level of understanding that, yeah, more teams could do more and be celebrated for the work they're doing. But little snippets of the learning that came from Xbox adaptive controller started to be discovered elsewhere. We just released the mouse 3d printable mouse. We call the adaptive mouse. If you think Xbox, yeah, great. That's a certain population, a certain number of the population, but so many more people use a mouse. I'm left handed, all through my life I never had a left handed mouse. Now Microsoft will sell you a left handed mouse. And if you have a limb difference, you can 3D print your mouse. We've open sourced all the designs. You can tweak them to 3D print a tail for your mouse to give you your mouse configured to your needs. That confidence to deliver that at scale across the world at low cost or, you know, just standard cost, assistive technology, that came from Xbox, 100 percent came from Xbox. The team who delivered the, uh, the adaptive mouse took their inspiration from the Xbox team, worked with them, partnered with them, met the same people. So innovation drives more innovation on a political aspect and a human culture kind of aspect, but also in a, what did you learn? So it creates kind of co-opetition. Hey, we want to be the most inclusive. That's cool.

TS: 38:52

And also this is, you know, all this is possible because of the cultural shift that has had to happen within the organization. And that comes from, like you said, hiring people with disabilities. So I wanted to talk about, you know, Microsoft's other goal, which is, you know, reducing the unemployment rate for people with disabilities. Can you tell us more about that and how, how you're doing on that front?

HM: 39:14

Yeah, so, so it's our Disability Divide campaign, essentially. So I sit within a team called Technology for Fundamental Rights, and we're across all aspects of human rights. Now, the accessibility team made a commitment three years ago now to the Disability Divide. There's so much we can do as Microsoft, right? But as I've said, what we should have an ambition around is how do our products empower people with disabilities to find education, to have access to work, to find gainful employment, to be able to take training in work and find promotion, not just work, but you know, to have access to the same training that everybody else has. That's an accessibility goal for us. So when you look at the work I'm doing with all of our customers around the world to help them with their journey. I'm not just sitting there saying, how do you build a product in banking to be more accessible? I'm talking to the HR folks about, and their IT teams about how do we make sure you're able to employ people with disabilities in this organization?

And many people will say to me, Oh, we don't employ people with disabilities here. And what they're really saying is. I don't know anybody with a disability here because no one talks about it. So, so there's this, I call it the horizon approach, but essentially helping organizations, government organizations, education authorities, private businesses, the tech sector at wide, to essentially understand there's a, there's a level one, horizon one of, do you employ people with disabilities and do they all know how to use the tools? And when you interview people with disabilities, do you know how to do it and allow them to use their own technology in that way? That's a skills piece. That's a confidence and a skills and an awareness piece. I meet people all the time who don't know there are captions in Teams. Well, if you don't know there are captions in Teams, and you meet somebody who says they're hard of hearing at an interview, you ain't giving them a job, because you'll start saying things like, you're going to find it hard here, yeah?

But it's not hard here, is it? If I can access captions on Teams at every meeting, right? And I can work from home, and I can be a bit more remote. So there's a, there's a confidence and a skilling game, okay? Then it's moving on to the built infrastructure and then it's moving on to the product. But essentially, if you think about our own changing of our inclusive hiring programs to bring disability talent to Microsoft, there's only so much impact we can have ourselves. Like we can, we can employ X number of people. Okay. But when we think about the world and its confidence to understand what's built in, what's available, how to do it, get confident, how to build infrastructure to support people with disabilities, and then how to build products, when we start having rich conversations with the C suite. And that's the other thing I just want to share with you, it was a bit of a shock to me when I was pulled in to meet CHROs, CTOs, CEOs of some of the biggest companies in the world to have a conversation about disability inclusion. Once you get the C suite to feel confident around some of these topics, you start to see real commitments and real change. So when we think about the disability divide and what we want to do, to me, it's all about having much wider ranges of conversations with people who are not even at the table, and that will influence the employment of people with disabilities.

And just a quick bit on my government engagement as well, because I think that, particularly for the UK folks, we've just come out of a project where we've trained 23, 000 work coaches at the Department for Work and Pensions, the, the job centres on Microsoft accessibility. So they now know that there's magnification and dictation and dyslexia, reading capability on, on, on job applications and things like this. Okay. We're now working with companies to start saying like, who are the core group within society who need training on accessibility? And so this work we've done with the UK government and the work coaches as a model we can do anywhere, by the way, that's also part of our investment in terms of the disability divide. Companies will do hiring. And Microsoft will do its bit and the tech sector should absolutely lean into hiring disability talent to build accessible technologies and do the tech thing, but the bigger win for us is that schools, government authorities, citizens advice bureaus, work coaches, become a bit more digital. You know, it's not really acceptable nowadays if you're a work coach working with somebody with a disability, getting them, you know, getting them settled into the workplace, and you don't know what accessibility features are available and the technology that person's being asked to use, you're letting that person down. I mean, and that's not to be confrontational, but in a digital world, you're not giving them the information they need, you know, so the investment we need to make is Microsoft is a skills investment, but it's never going to be private business alone or the tech sector alone. It's going to be NGOs, disabled people's organizations, governments who all want to, you know, narrow their disability employment gap.

It's a big challenge for countries around the world. As Microsoft, we really want to be the conveners on that skills approach. And just to be super clear, there's great accessibility built into our competitors products as well. Like this is, this is not only Microsoft at the table here. You know, if you're using an Android phone or using an Apple phone or using an iPad, there's accessibility built in right there as well. So, but what we've learned in our engagement and as part of this campaign for disability inclusion and disability employment is it's not just about confidence. It is also about do you have the knowledge and the capability to hire people with disabilities in this organization? And what role increasingly is technology going to play there?

TS: 44:19

So I wanted to talk about the challenges of building inclusive AI, more inclusive AI, especially, you know, given the data desert, we could share what Microsoft is doing, what are their priority areas?

HM: 44:30

You can't escape AI. AI is. AI is here and it's in so many aspects of your life already, right? So there's huge wins, productivity wins. And so we're all going to go racing towards this new set of tools. And so people are already talking about AI driven job screening platforms. Well, if your speech is slower than somebody else and somebody writes into the algorithm, slow speech equals low intelligence equals no job. Well, that's ridiculous, right? But it will happen. Absolutely guarantee you people will start making mistakes and building systems that don't provide the full experience. So we've learned a lot in terms of AI over the last five or six years about, you've got to be super deliberate about data capture to make sure that it includes the lived experiences of people with disabilities. And that's everything from learning disability through to cognitive disability, to visual disabilities. I mean, and there are huge wins out there, by the way, just for people with disabilities, about what AI can do to kind of level the playing field. But the fundamental is, well, think of it this way, about 95 percent of the world's websites are not accessible to people with disabilities at the front page, because people have not deliberately made them accessible for people with disabilities. The AI challenge is exactly the same. So if you're building an AI data set to be used by the general populace but it's not including the experiences of the general populace, your product is A, not going to work as well as it should. And it may inadvertently exclude people unless you deliberately include people in that data gathering.

So, that's something we're working with the technology sector on. It's something we're publishing white papers on. Uh, it's something we're trying to kind of make sure that people understand. I'm actually pretty glad it's getting a lot of attention. I mean, I think you'll see in the press, people are wary of kind of, you know, are we running too fast on this? And, and in many ways. Like anything, people are chasing the prize, aren't they? They want to be the first to market with this AI driven tool. Our job as Microsoft is to kind of say, Hey, look, we've been here a while now, people, and we know that there's certain safeguards you need to be starting to put in place, and you as, if you're new to data gathering for AI, Don't just run off, stop for a moment and start thinking about kind of, you know, what you're, what you're going to be building here. So that's something it's again, it's an education program. It's something that regulators will think about over time. We should be supporting regulators to understand accessibility and disability, uh, to get more confident on it. And I think that's what we're going to start to see.

But my general, my general summary on it, honestly. It's the same challenge we've always had, whether it's digital transformation or AI, the same challenge is, do people care enough about disability inclusion? Hopefully what we've picked up on in the last hour is, it shouldn't just be about caring about it. It should be about actually just wanting to build great experiences. It's exciting. I'm as excited as I was 28 years ago. We shouldn't let concerns get in the way of us kind of engaging with people with disabilities to build the things that we actually want to build. I was watching uh, the president of Microsoft Brad Smith the other day talking about it's not AI that's going to do the damage, it's humans with AI that's going to do the damage. It's like, it's the history of human, humanity is the tool's going to sit in the middle. Bad actors are going to do bad actor stuff, right? What we need to be doing is kind of, you know, really getting organizations culturally to focus on human inclusion and human equality and parity. And that's, that's, that's, that's the journey we're on. We're going to be busy for a while.

TS: 47:51

That was Hector Minto of Microsoft. You'll find links to learn more about Microsoft's accessibility tools and details on how to follow Hector in the show notes. You can share your feedback on this episode by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also tag @MadeForUsPodcast on LinkedIn and Instagram. I'm Tosin Sulaiman, thank you for listening to Made For Us.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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