Jenny Lay-Flurrie: How AI is rewriting accessibility

Jenny Lay-Flurrie is the chief accessibility officer at Microsoft, where she leads the company’s efforts to ensure its products and services are accessible to people with disabilities. She founded the Disability Resource Group at Microsoft and chaired it for 10 years and also created the Disability Answer Desk to provide customer support to people with disabilities. Lay-Flurrie identifies as deaf and disabled and was recognized as a Disability Employment Champion of Change by the White House in 2014. Lay-Flurrie shared her approach in an interview with Formidable.

You’ve spent your career in technology and telecom advocating for accessibility and disability inclusion. How has the industry evolved during that time? The biggest shift has been the importance of people, especially disabled people in the product-making process. It’s been incredible to see how tech companies have embraced the need for expertise. And it’s led to some amazing innovation – opening up gaming to disabled gamers with the adaptive controller, leaps in speech recognition and captioning, voice control on TV remotes, eyegaze, and personal voices. That was all led, influenced, and carefully curated with and by disabled people.

As the chief accessibility officer at Microsoft, how do you embed accessibility into such a large organization and what structural changes have you overseen to ensure accessibility is prioritized? I had an incredible gift coming into this role almost 10 years ago: Microsoft’s mission to empower every person, every organization to achieve more, which includes the 1.3 billion disabled people around the world. Accessibility is the vehicle to deliver on that promise. We take that seriously. We are the only company that I know of that has made accessibility 101 a mandatory course for every employee. We do that to give every employee pragmatic tips, advice, tools to help make their workplace, meetings and events accessible. To (hopefully) deliver on our goal of building, usable, delightful and paradigm-changing technology. We have a strong central accessibility team and community of accessibilitarians that oversee every aspect of our physical and digital experience across the company. Each person is passionate and accountable to bring the right experience to life. It’s an ongoing journey, but we are proud of the progress.

How do you measure success in accessibility efforts both qualitatively and quantitatively? Carefully! It takes systems thinking and continual focus on culture and skilling to make sure that we have a scalable process and governance that works across 6,000 products, websites and tools, and over 230,000 people. Ultimately, the goal is to build accessible (products) by design. But we also test our products using tools like accessibilityinsights.io, invest in usability and listen deeply and carefully to our customers and community. The biggest source of that data is the Disability Answer Desk which handles approximately 10,000 calls from disabled customers every month, helping with technology as needs change. Their feedback, ideas, and yes, sometimes, issues give us invaluable ideas to fix and improve our products. As product cycles decrease and we ship quicker, it’s important for us to continue to shift left and code accessible, by design. And to put even more priority and focus on feedback from the community.

How will AI transform accessibility? Where do you see the biggest opportunities and the biggest challenges? There are definitely harms that we need to help mitigate. Some are new harms, for example the need for authentic representation of disability, both in imagery and making sure that we don’t apologize when someone identifies as deaf or blind, but we ask how we can support. Let’s not propagate bias! Some are old harms that carry into this era such as making sure new environments are accessible from get go. Build accessibly by design rather than bug fixing. It’s urgent that we systematically explore and address these harms because the upside of AI for accessibility is immense. As a deaf person, my life has already changed with AI. In every Teams meeting, I have captions, transcript, sign language detection and the option to get meeting notes at the end of the meeting, accurately, with a click of a button. For neurodiverse (autism, dyslexia), we have the simple ability to summarize, draft, and review a document quickly and easily. For blind and low vision, we have the ability describe images and even videos within seconds. AI is saving people hours, sometimes days of time and cognitive load. And we’re at the tip of the iceberg. I wake up ready to learn, tackle those harms and explore the possibilities. I am excited to see how it powers independence in everyday life.

Formidable Founding Member and Women in Cloud Founder Chaitra Vedullapalli has recently launched OPULIS: Women Powering Microsoft’s Trillion-Dollar Shift. This collector’s book and leadership playbook celebrates 50 women who helped shape Microsoft’s evolution into the AI era, including Jenny Lay-Flurrie. Sales of the book support scholarships for Microsoft’s AI Certification program, helping empower the next generation of underrepresented leaders in tech gain the skills they need to succeed.