AccessWorld Podcast, Episode #27: A Conversation with Jamie Dean from Microsoft Accessibility

Episode Notes

In this episode of AccessWorld, Tony and Aaron sit down for a conversation with Jamie Dean, senior corporate counsel on Microsoft’s accessibility team. For over a decade, Microsoft has led the way toward innovating advancements in assistive technology and digital accessibility. Joining Microsoft in 2021, Jamie shares what led him to Microsoft after 12 years in private practice as an attorney, and how his perspectives as someone with the lived experience of blindness amplify his passion toward helping to make the world more accessible for all.

In addition to his service as a member of AFB’s Board of Trustees, he also serves as board chair of the Academy for Certification of Vision Rehabilitation and Education Professionals (ACVREP).

Editor’s Note: During our conversation, we give a shout-out to Jenny Lay-Flurrie, who leads Microsoft’s accessibility team. Jenny was recently elevated to head Microsoft’s Trusted Technology Group, which includes the accessibility team along with other key teams under Microsoft committed to “upholding the highest standards of trust, safety, and responsible business standards” as Microsoft develops and deploys new technologies. Jamie shares how the collaboration across these teams creates a positive culture that elevates accessibility, and we’re excited to see how new technologies coming out of Microsoft can empower people of all abilities.

AccessWorld Podcast, Episode 27 Transcript:

V/O:

You're listening to Access World, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. Access World is a production of the American Foundation for the Blind. Learn more at www.afb.org/aw.

Tony Stephens:

And welcome everybody to Access World, a podcast produced by the American Foundation for the Blind. I'm Tony Stevens with AFB, and I'll be joined in just a minute by Aaron Priest, our editor-in-chief of Access World Magazine. Today we have an opportunity to sit down with Jamie Dean, Jamie Senior Corporate Counsel for Microsoft on their accessibility team. He's also a member of the AFB Board of Trustees and someone with lived experience. So we get a chance to not just learn about the exciting work taking place on the accessibility team at Microsoft, but also get a glimpse into Jamie's past his days practicing law and what brought him to Microsoft. Jamie's based out of North Carolina down south, so as we head down to the land of the Pines and make our way to North Carolina, we hope you'll sit down and enjoy the episode today with Jamie Dean.

Joining us all the way from, I'd say, sunny North Carolina, but it's wintery down there as well. Hey, Jamie, welcome.

Jamie Dean:

Thanks so much. I'm glad to be here.

Tony Stephens:

Yeah. So you are based out of North Carolina. You're not in Seattle, which I keep forgetting. Every time I try to communicate with you, I always think, oh, he's three hours before. But no, you're on the East Coast in terms

Jamie Dean:

Of- That's right. Microsoft's East Coast Outpost.

Tony Stephens:

Exactly. Yeah. But thanks so much for taking time to join with us. We're looking forward to chatting today. We're going to be learning a little bit about just your own sort of path into that corporate council world, being an attorney, also someone who's blind as well. But really, in a sense, diving into a lot of the exciting stuff that Microsoft is also working on and the accessibility front, AFB has been excited over the years when I was at ACB, the American Council of the Blind as well. Loved always working with Microsoft, with Jenny Lay Fleury and that entire team. It's an exciting group of folks, a cohort you have there out at Redmond and scattered around in other locations as well. But thanks so much for taking time to join with us. We are excited and as much to say that as we're sort of launching into this new sort of year, really focusing on a lot of the technology.

Aaron and I have talked in past podcasts. Folks can check out our earlier podcast where we talk about AI. And we've waxed and waned on a lot of things like Meta and Waymo and a lot of these products that are physical. Everyone for decades and decades, for generations now have known about Microsoft, but I don't think folks know as much as well as some of the backend stuff that Microsoft's really leading the way in terms of accessibility, but also in just AI and things like that. But it's definitely one of the giants in that space. So look forward to talking about some of that stuff later in the podcast. But first, share with us a little bit about what it is that brought you to Microsoft. And I'm most interested too about just your path. And I'm always fascinated to talk with people that carve their way through the legal facets.

A number of my friends that have, as people that are blind as well, working through that process of like the LSAT and grad school and law school and everything. It's hard enough for anybody that's cited. And then we hear about some of the challenges people have going through that process because of their visual impairment or blindness. But talk to us a little bit about where it is you came from, what it is that made you have a passion to want to go into law and kind of that whole process. And about if you're comfortable talking about as well from the blindness perspective too, a little bit about that background.

Jamie Dean:

Absolutely. So I wish I could say that I had a master plan when I went to college and that I always knew I was going to be an attorney and had defined all of the steps along the way to reach that goal. But the reality was when I came to my senior year at Wake Forest University here in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, having studied economics for the past four years, I really didn't know what I was going to do and I needed a job. So I made the smart move and decided to delay the work world by four years by pursuing a JD MBA. So that's a law degree and a master's in business administration, which I thought would give me maximum flexibility when I reached the workforce. And I also knew just from my growing up years, my mom had always been a legal practice manager, legal assistant.

So I knew the good work that attorneys can do. And I also knew that it was a pretty accessible career, that there were blind people who were attorneys and judges and who had already walked that path. So I did the JDMBA program. I stayed at Wake Forest. I did the JD MBA program, and I really loved it. I enjoyed the MBA side. It was different from what I'd studied in undergrad and also I was just with an older cohort of people who helped me think more in a more mature way about profession, and that was great. But the subject matter of the law really appealed to me. I enjoyed reading cases and doing mock trials and all of those types of things that lawyers do. From the blindness perspective, it's interesting to look back on it now because I am a borderline Gen X millennial, born in the early 80s.

And we were still in the era where the presumption wasn't that everything was going to be delivered to you in a digitally accessible way. I guess I'm thinking specifically about the LSAT. You referenced that at the beginning. My LSAT was still read to me by a human, which was weird trying to do these logic games and puzzles that a person is reading to you. But by the time I got to the bar exam, they had a computer sitting there with jaws on it. I had time to set it up the way that I wanted, and I took the bar exam using a screen reader. So there's even some evolution in that time period, but I loved the experience. Wake Forest is a great school. They worked really hard to make the experience accessible for me. And then I went directly into the law firm world.

I spent about 12 years as a general commercial litigator handling all kinds of cases from insurance to trade secrets and free speech. I was really fortunate to have a mentor who wanted to get me into the courtroom. So I had trial experience early, just got to participate in all the aspects of legal practice. But after making it to partner and being there for a couple of years, I started to wonder if there were other things I could do that may appeal more to my personal passions. And I was fortunate to find just on a random job search, the Microsoft job posting looking for someone to come and support their legal team working on accessibility. And I got that job and I've been there for about four and a half years now. And in the past year, I've been reporting directly to the chief accessibility officer at Jenny LeFleury.

Tony Stephens:

What was it you think that ... I mean, because the four and a half years would have been, I guess, on the back end of the pandemic, right? When we were coming out of the pandemic.

Jamie Dean:

Yes.

Tony Stephens:

Did that have a factor in some soul searching there?

Jamie Dean:

Oh, totally.

Tony Stephens:

My friends that are similar litigators, the whole world when it shifted over to courtroom Zoom meetings, I think some of the best things that came out of the pandemic were the horror stories you'd hear about, what was it? The person that had funny avatars on- The

Jamie Dean:

Cat filter. Yes. Yeah,

Tony Stephens:

Exactly. Yeah. Things like that. Were those challenges or did that spark some soul searching or do you think it was sort of lingering in there for years?

Jamie Dean:

I think what it did was it gave me a chance to pause and think because the pace did slow down a little bit. And for me, I enjoyed being a litigator and I was successful at being a litigator, but I'm also a very curious person. And I realized that if I didn't make a change, my days were going to look pretty much the same for the next 30 years until retiring. And I just thought, I want to try something different. I want to see what it's like to be an in- house lawyer, but especially when this opportunity arose to work on accessibility. I mean, for me, working on accessibility at Microsoft, it was the easiest cover letter you could ever write for a job application because at every significant moment for me in my education and in my career, I had a Windows PC at my fingertips.

Every deposition I took, every trial that I was in, every brief that I wrote used a Windows PC. And that's actually true going back to late high school when I started using JAWS on Windows to write out my essays in my AP English class. I still remember when I made that transition. And so I really believe strongly in the product. And it's not just the belief that, "Hey, this is a cool product," but what I understand is these tools are empowering people to change their lives. Those accessible tools made it possible for me and has made it possible for millions of other people with disabilities to work, to engage with people in their community, to play games and have fun. These products are making a difference at a global scale. And that idea was extremely appealing to me and it's something that I feel tremendous passion about.

Tony Stephens:

I imagine coming to the table, you probably had experienced some of those challenges of accessibility, not so much maybe in the windows front, but with a lot of the things that were like applications, things that ... The idea that we can make a platform be accessible as much as the other developers for other software and things like that make things accessible for us. In the legal world, were there things ... I'm just trying to think of LexisNexis or things back in the day that were like big headaches where you ... It's one thing you say it's the easiest job location. Were there actual experiences you had where you were banging your head against the wall going, "Yeah, I can feel like I can carry the mantra or the torch for this, the champion inclusion in a sense from a corporate

Jamie Dean:

Side." A hundred percent. I would say that the big legal research platforms like Westlaw and Lexus, they've always done a pretty good job in my time of making their platforms accessible. So if anyone from those companies is listening, thanks. Appreciate you. But definitely some of the applications that we used in the office setting that were more generic were difficult. And when we transitioned to remote hearings, for example, at the beginning of COVID, I mean, there were some platforms that were very difficult for me to use. All blind people experienced that, obviously. And so I appreciated when a platform doesn't work for a sighted person, it's kind of a frustration. But if you're listening right now and you're a blind person and I start talking about a platform that's inaccessible, your heart rate might start going up a little bit and your palms might start to sweat because you realize how it's not just an inconvenience, it's an existential threat to your career.

And so I deeply appreciate that, understand the anxiety and frustration that's caused when the work tools you depend on don't do what they're supposed to do. And so my number one job at Microsoft is to help people in the company who are building understand what they're legally required to do. I'm a lawyer, so that's my job, is help you define the legal line, but that's always flavored with a little bit of the personal story and personal advocacy to say, even when we have a legal bar, here is the, I'll even say the word, here's the moral reason for us to do a little bit more, or here's the personal reason to do it a little bit differently. And so that's always shading my conversations, even as I'm trying to give clear lines of what the law requires as well.

Tony Stephens:

So Jamie, I mean, it's great hearing you talk about that with the lived experience and being able to sort of bring that to the table as an extension of the accessibility team at Microsoft, not just internal, but also working beyond Microsoft. What's great is Microsoft over the recent years, especially, has sort of gone above and beyond some of those legal requirements and really innovated some great stuff. I mean, Aaron, you were talking earlier, share with us about Aaron on your end. It was great hearing you talk about what jazzes you up with Microsoft on the access side that's sort of that above and beyond.

Aaron Preece:

Yeah, for sure. I remember just the transition and narrator in particular from Windows eight to Windows 10 and suddenly being able to buy a computer and not need any sort of cited assistance whatsoever to set it up and just being able to do that on my own. And even just recently, still, anytime I would get a new computer or something, it's a little bit of a giddy feeling just being able to open that up and set it up on my own. And I know just the increase in accessibility tools in general, the Windows like 10 and 11 OCR feature, I use it through NVDA, but just being able ... The amount of times I trigger that keystroke to do an OCR of the current window, to read inaccessible screenshots, to be able to navigate to things that I couldn't otherwise click, just be able to brute force accessibility with that.

I use it dozens of times a day, I would say every single day.

Tony Stephens:

In that sense, Jamie, that's sort of going above and beyond, right? I mean, those examples, but then too, when you look at the seeing AI app, remember when that came out seeing AI and it was before ChatGPT for years, like this idea, "Oh, AI, what is this? " I mean, now it's everywhere, but that was so innovative. Again, another thing of just going above and beyond. What is it with your team, Jamie? And is there a sense that there's this desire to not just meet the legal requirements, but there's a passion to go further?

Jamie Dean:

Oh, totally. And there's a lot there that we just said that I've got to respond to because first of all, I want you to know, Aaron, I've got this huge grin on my face when you said you felt giddy when you set up the computer on your own. So in front of me, I have my work computer, which is a laptop seven, it's Copilot plus PC. It's awesome. And then I also have over to the side here, my personal laptop three, and it's also a surface. And so I had that exact same experience when I bought the personal computer and it's five years old now. And I remember taking it out of the box, turning it on and being able to launch Narrator and go through the out of box experience, our weak little fun industry term, Ubi, out of box experience, and do it all by myself.

And it was an incredible feeling. And to me, that is the kind of thing that really changes the narrative for people with disabilities, not just blind people, when suddenly we've reduced the friction point on technology so that you can get a device off the shelf, use it without the need for any third party tools and accomplish the tasks that you need to accomplish. Kudos, Apple's done the same thing. I remember getting an iPod touch and just the incredible experience I had of turning on voiceover and reading books with it. And those are life-changing moments for me of new technologies that suddenly leveled the playing field. And Tony, to your question, there's absolutely that sense on the accessibility team at Microsoft that what we're trying to do is create a delightful, empowering experience. Our mission at Microsoft is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.

And we view that as empowering people with disabilities to use our technologies independently. And that's sparked by a lot of things. Jenny Lay Flurry, the chief accessibility officer at Microsoft, she really starts by leading with such an excellent culture and such an excellent understanding of the community. Jenny is deaf, and so she gets it. She understands the need for accessible technology. But then we have many people on our team who either have a disability themselves or have a relationship to disability that gives them that personal drive to do more.

Tony Stephens:

And it's great. And Jenny just rising to the ranks of really being one of the global leaders in accessibility. And that culture that she carries definitely carries out through all the other members of your team, I know that I've had a chance to meet with, but just all the way to the top of Microsoft for Mr. Smith and everybody that kind of feeds down to have a chief accessibility officer, that's not common everywhere.

Jamie Dean:

Right. And you're so right. I mean, the CEO of Microsoft is Satya Nadella, and Satya has been vocal about his experience with having a child with a disability and committing to accessibility, and he continues to be a champion for accessibility. He was the executive sponsor for our first disability employee group, so someone who's deeply committed. And then Brad Smith, the president, again, he just understands how technology relates to fundamental rights of people. And so he sees accessibility as a fundamental right, and Brad is the one who a decade ago made Jenny, the chief accessibility officer, he had that vision to do that, and we've been going strong ever since. And I would say just the features, I do want to talk in a minute about some of the fun AI stuff that we're creating, because it's really cool. And as Tony pointed out, I mean, I like to say we were doing AI before it was cool.

We were doing seeing AI back in 2017, which was an app that can do everything from read text to tell you if the lights are on, identify color. It's got some navigation features. It's just an incredible app, very innovative. I

Tony Stephens:

Still use it daily on my phone. It's on that first screen on the phone. Oh,

Jamie Dean:

Same for me. Yep.

Tony Stephens:

Yeah.

Jamie Dean:

First page, top row. So those things are great, but one thing that people don't realize, and I think Aaron, this gets to some of the things that we talked about is so much work is being done quote unquote under the hood right now on Narrator, with the desire to make it a world-class screen reader. And we have had a lot of partners in that work, so the Blind Information Technology Specialists, the Daisy Consortium, we have a blind advisory board. So we have a lot of voices on the community helping us understand what needs to be done in Narrator. And the improvements are really noticeable if you launch and use the updated version of Narrator. I mean, it's so much better now in Excel. It's performance in general is just faster. It does better with longer sessions. And like I said, I'll talk about AI features in a minute, but just that kind of work under the hood, those are heavy lifts.

When you're talking about taking old code base, modernizing it and improving it, it's not a small undertaking. And so I'm so impressed with the work that they've done and then their focus on making narrator best where it's most important. So that means in Office products like Word, things that people use for work. And the team that is doing Office accessibility, they're just incredible, they're innovative. They really want to make this experience great for blind people. Products like Narrator are really, really important. Probably those of us on this call are probably NVDA or JAWS users 95% of the time. That's what we grew up with. When I learned accessible technology, I learned JAWS, and so that's what I stuck with. But there are a lot of people who are losing their vision and they don't have access to a third party screen reader. They don't have access to training to use a screen reader.

And we also know that the learning curve on a screen reader can be pretty steep and not everybody even needs a full fledged screen reader all the time. They may need help situationally. And so this is what I love about Narrator is anybody can launch it. It instantly comes on with the shortcut Windows control enter and you can have a screen reader that's working for you and that is completely adequate for your needs. And that means that everybody who has a Windows PC has an accessible Windows experience. So to me, it's hugely important. And I do encourage people to try Narrator, even if you're a Jaws or an NVDA user, check it out. I do this. I now prefer Narrator for some tasks over other screen readers. I have on my personal computer, Narrator is actually the screen reader that launches automatically at the logon screen because I just find it to be a little bit more stable and easy to use for the logon process.

And if I'm doing hardcore drafting or something, I'll switch to Jaws, but it really is good and I encourage people to try it.

Tony Stephens:

What are some of the other exciting things that you had mentioned about what's going on with AI and stuff? What else is really jazzing you up? You

Jamie Dean:

Can tell I'm getting into my second cup of coffee here because I'm talking faster and excited, but this stuff also pumps me up. So let's just stick with Narrator because it's kind of the most relevant for this community. So I just got my Copilot Plus PC about two weeks ago. I was like that little kid waiting every day for the delivery man. And when he came with the box, I dropped everything to set it up. But Narrator has embedded a AI powered feature for image description that has got me super excited. So this is on Copilot + PCs. This is a super cool feature because it's local. So you're describing images with models and technologies that are built into your machine. And if you want a more technical description than that, you're going to have to get someone who's not a lawyer on your podcast, but it works so well.

So yesterday I was on a Teams call with a colleague and they posted one of my other accessibility colleagues, Jessica Rafus, who you all probably have met, she was posting a picture of some new kittens that they had. And she of course helpfully included a description of that picture, but I just did an image description with Narrator. If you're using Narrator, it's capslock Control D for description. And it was amazing. I mean, it was not just two cats, right? It was like

Two colorful kittens sitting on a rug. One is laying on top of the other, looking playful. I mean, it was just an incredible description and it took just seconds to generate. And so the ability to understand what everyone else who sees a screen understands and to do it instantaneously is super, super cool. And

Tony Stephens:

That model is all built in. It's not going up to the cloud to try to decipher that?

Jamie Dean:

Yeah, that's local. That image description is just local. Now, there's a couple other features. These weren't built as accessible. Well, this next one wasn't built as an accessibility feature. I can say that safely. And I don't have as deep of a understanding of exactly how the information is processed, except that I know that the images that are captured aren't kept stored or used in any way they delete after the interaction, right? So that experience is Copilot vision. Now, Copilot is our AI app at Microsoft, you can download it on your iPhone, you can also run it on your computer. And Copilot recently added this feature called Copilot Vision. All right, so let me just give you some use cases for how I've used this. And again, it wasn't built specifically as an existive technology, but it works really well for some use cases for blind people.

So with my Copilot app on my iPhone, for example, and it's my favorite way, honestly, to just do basic research because I like to talk to it. I type all day. So anytime I can start talking to a device instead of typing on it, I do. So I turn on Copilot and I just start asking it questions. Well, if I turn on the Copilot chat feature and then I enable Copilot vision, it sees what I'm looking at through my phone camera. So earlier this summer, we got some new patio furniture, I'm impatient, I wanted to put the patio furniture together and not wait for a sighted person. So I just used Copilot Vision. I had to read the instructions to me. I had to look at the pieces and match them up with what was in the instructions, even things like distinguishing between the individual bolts, and it worked super well for that.

And then another more recent example, our family, after having a beloved minivan for about 13 years, it finally died on us. So we got a new vehicle and there's so many buttons on a dashboard. And as the person who's always in the passenger seat, I always want to know what all those buttons do and control things. So I just sat there with my phone and pointed it at the dashboard and said, "What are the controls? How do they work?" And it was incredible how I could get instantaneous feedback based on what the phone was seeing. And then that combines that AI knowledge aspect so that it's giving me accurate instructions, not just on what the buttons say, but it's telling me what they actually do because it understands what the vehicle is and what the functions are. You take that now over to the Windows context.

So you can launch Copilot on your Windows machine, you can share your screen with it, all right? So it can see what's on my screen. And I did this as an example, just playing with it today, I opened up Outlook, I launched this beach feature, I launched the screen share feature, and I just started talking to my machine and said, "Can you see what I'm looking at?" Of course it could. I was like, "Well, I want to create a new folder so I can organize my inbox." Interestingly, the first thing it told me to do was right click on something and it said, "Oh, and I'm highlighting that for you so you can see where to do it on the screen," which that would be super helpful if I was low vision or if I were sighted. Of course, that's not helpful to me at all.

So I just said, "Oh, I'm blind. I need you to tell me how to do this with my keyboard." Immediately, it's like, "Oh, here's the shortcut key. I did it. It worked." And it can give you visual confirmation that what you're doing is working. That kind of technology is what gets me extremely excited, not just for me, but the other people that I'm really excited for are my parents' generation. I don't know about you two, but family holidays come around and it can sometimes be like Jamie's the family IT person for every device that isn't working.

And my parents are constantly ... It's hard for them. This is a big paradigm that they're going through with technology and they're in their 70s, but I think if they could launch Copilot and say to Copilot, "All right, I've got an Excel spreadsheet open for my family budget, how do I total the numbers that are in a column?" Or they say, "How do I create a new email account? How do I log into my Gmail using Microsoft Outlook?" And then it can walk them through the process. We're talking about a huge advancement that benefits just a large segment of society, not just blind and low vision people, but a huge group.

Tony Stephens:

It really is. Yeah. No, go

Jamie Dean:

Ahead. Go ahead. I was going to say there's one other thing that's exciting to me too on this vein, and it's more on the creator side. And again, this is disability specific, but in Microsoft Word, we've had auto-generated altags for a long time if you put images into the document, and they were kind of mediocre. They were very, very basic. And so what they've done now is they made a design choice that they're no longer going to auto-populate Altags. They're going to have you generate the Altag Like on the image, when you want an auto generated Altec, but they're going to use more advanced AI models. And so instead of having that two, three word description of what something is, you now have that two, three sentence robust description in the word document. So instead of just maybe saying an image of a line chart, you now have a very robust description of the data and what the chart is portraying.

So those are a couple of different things that we're using AI on that particularly benefit blind people, but benefit everybody.

Tony Stephens:

Do you think that's one of the things that's the more that accessibility is kind of a default? We've kind of overcome one mountain, which was when things would just be built, not being shut out when you try to log into something and it's like, oh, it's not working. I mean, it's just like decades ago, headaches. But now it's not just these accessible sort of things built just for us, but the idea that where things are going with AI, and we talked a little bit about this last month's podcast with the plenary from our AFP leadership conference, you were graciously on that panel. Thanks again. But part of the conversation was these ideas that this AI, the stuff that's being built not for us, but it's a huge benefit for us. Do you think this is a trend that's going to continue? Just the more and more we move in this space.

I mean, we've talked about it with autonomous vehicles on this or the metaglasses. Aaron and I have talked ad nauseam about those.

Jamie Dean:

Yeah.

Tony Stephens:

Is this kind of our new direction?

Jamie Dean:

So yeah, I think so with some caveats. So I want to say yes, general purpose AI technologies have a tremendous potential to benefit people with disabilities. And I think that's because of the design paradigm of AI. I mean, it's meant to be personal. It's meant to provide very context, specific, functional support to every single user. And so maybe it's a user who's perfectly cited who just wants to know what is this piece of art that I'm looking at? Or they just want to edit a picture. Whereas I would use that same functionality to say, "Describe what I'm looking at. I don't even know what it looks like, so tell me what it looks like. " So I think that that's what we're seeing right now is that as we create these really context smart personal technologies as the original life hackers, people with disabilities are finding ways to use them for disability specific purposes.

But I would say in large part, that has happened as a unintended positive consequence of the way the technology is designed. What we need to make sure we're doing is continuing to be diligent to ensure that as these technologies are designed, the technologies themselves are accessible so that anybody can actually use them. And we need to make sure that there aren't negative unintended consequences for people with disabilities. There's just so much work that goes into maintaining accessibility, even in a well-established app like Windows or Word. And there's so much work that goes into creating a new app that is fully accessible. We're just not at the point where it just happens yet. There's not an accessibility button you just push and your code editor. It still takes a lot of work and we've got to make sure we're doing that work, but we also have to think really broadly about with AI, how are people with disabilities being portrayed?

What types of information about people with disabilities are going into AI reasoning processes and what are the outcomes for people with disabilities when AI is making decisions? All of those things are kind of the counterbalance to the excitement that we feel. We just know there's a lot of work we have to keep doing.

Aaron Preece:

Something that stands out to me with your examples of like the Copilot vision is the accuracy, especially with the examples of like the patio furniture and the dashboard buttons, being able to both describe those to you, but actually know what they are and be able to tell you more, identify specific bolts and that kind of thing, that level of accuracy I think is exciting. And it's with the screen sharing, one of the things we do when we do accessibility testing is like peer accessibility testing where I'm testing a website, but I'm also screen sharing or have someone looking over my shoulder to tell me if I missed something or if I see a button that's unlabeled, tell me what that is so I know what I'm missing. And it seems like you could kind of use AI like that to some degree to help you with those kind of things.

And then I guess it sounds like in some ways we want to make sure in a lot of cases, AI is kind of bridging the gap, but we need to fill in the gap and not rely entirely on AI to fix a lot of ... Yeah. Well,

Tony Stephens:

It's not captain, it's Copilot. And I love

Jamie Dean:

That.

Tony Stephens:

Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah. But I just love the copilot, just as a branding, whoever on your team at Microsoft thought of that from branding, because so much of the AI, my ChatGPT person I have said to call Simon, because I don't know if you all, you're probably too young, Aaron, I know for sure. Maybe Jame Yumer, there was this cartoon, maybe it was electric company, this kid named Simon and the things he draws come true. Anyway, so it was like this cartoon little series about this part. So anyway, so I call my AI chat person Simon, right? And we call it artificial intelligence. And it's like this idea that, oh, well, it's just a really smart voice that tells me something that answers questions, but Copilot's like literally a Copilot. It's literally like, it's not artificial intelligence, it's artificial helper assistance.

Jamie Dean:

Yeah. And one thing that I really love about Microsoft is this strong commitment to keep humans at the center of technology and see that with the CEO of our AI business, Mustafa Suleiman, you see that with Brad Smith. We want to make sure that our technology is people centered, not the other way around. And so the Copilot branding is very intentional and it's very descriptive of what we're achieving. That example that you gave, Aaron, is a good one. AI tools, people are using them already. There's companies out there that are entirely based on AI for accessibility testing. And I think that AI tools are a great supplement for accessibility testing. And maybe they can do things like provide more robust testing or more test passes for a lower cost than really human labor intensive testing. But there's still, to me, no substitute for having a person who relies on that technology, run through an experience and tell you how it works for them.

And there's also limitations to AI. A lot of the predictive code work that's done now with AI that is a huge benefit to developers generally, it might not be a huge benefit for accessibility yet because we don't have enough models that know how to write accessible code. So there's this need for, this kind of gets into the concept of data, but the data sources themselves have to promote accessibility, they have to promote the right depictions of people with disabilities in order for the AI that's using those data sources to be able to do that itself. AI is not better than the data is maybe the best way to say that. And so there's a lot of areas where I see huge potential for accessibility with AI, but we still have work to do on making sure that the data sources our AI is pulling from are going to lead to the right types of results.

Tony Stephens:

What do you think five, 10 years, if you had a crystal ball? And on a legal side too, what things can empower you more maybe on the legal space, meaning like actual laws or things, are there things that we need to do to better safeguard? I know there's always these conversations around privacy, right? There's also conversations around ... And I'm not asking you to wear some sort of hat of like, we need to advocate for this or do this, but just in a sense of like some of the hurdles that could open up more or in a sense, even make sure that we have the guardrails in place. Is there anything on your five-year radar that you're looking for from that legal perspective to help guide this innovation?

Jamie Dean:

Well, there's definitely people who are more qualified than me to talk about AI regulation generally. We don't need that. But at Microsoft, this is really cool. Our team sits in a group that's called Trusted Technology, the Trusted Technology Group. And Jenny, as the chief accessibility officer, her peers are our chief digital safety officer, our chief privacy officer. We have a director of responsible AI, and we don't work as a silo in accessibility. We're working closely with peers who are fully focused on these other domains. And so that gives me great confidence that there are people who are just as passionate about privacy, just as passionate about child safety online, as I am about accessibility. And we are working together to try to protect multiple fundamental rights while also being able to get the maximum potential out of AI. So from an accessibility perspective, what I'd say is, there's tensions that have to get worked out in the regulation.

As a blind person, I want the technology that can see and describe everything for me. I would love a technology with my Meta glasses. I would love to just be able to walk into a room and tell me who everyone is. They come up and chat with me. That'd be awesome.That would create some very obvious privacy concerns if I had glasses that could identify every person who had a Facebook account, for example. And so the tension that we work through is how do we pass legislation that protects the privacy rights of users? And that includes people with disabilities and blind people, but that also leaves space to innovate and that leaves space to use these technologies for accessibility purposes. And I'm not the first person who's ever noticed this tension or this need. This is well understood and you see it working out in legislative processes like in Europe right now, there's an AI act and accessibility purposes or something that are discussed in that act and that are subject to ongoing discussions, public comment processes with the European commission.

So there's a lot of brilliant people, far more brilliant than me who are looking at this. What I would say is just in general, we want to make sure that we always have AI as something that is empowering people and that's not controlling people. We want to make sure that the human is always the decision maker in the driver's seat. And so for accessibility, what that's going to mean for us is we're going to have to be patient while some of these things get worked out in regulations to ensure that other fundamental rights that are important to all of us are protected and are given the same level of consideration as accessibility.

Tony Stephens:

It's still exciting in a lot of ways to think that we are really in the infancy still, right?

Jamie Dean:

Absolutely.

Tony Stephens:

I mean, compared to like what Bill Gates and Paul Island in the 1980s, that was 40 something years ago in the infancy days that no one could imagine what would happen 40 years from now as things matured, what it's going to be like in 40 years. I'll be gone, Aaron, you'll still be here, but

Jamie Dean:

I hope so. And the need is only going to increase. That's the other thing. Microsoft in December published a research study that we did with Forrester Research, and it was a refresh of some research that had been done in 2003. So in 2003, they looked at the relationship between people and assistive technology and how it was used. Well, 2003, not that long ago in historical terms, think about how long ago 2003 was in technological terms,

No iPhones. I mean, 2003, I don't even know if we had ... We may have had the dashboard GPSs. Remember those when you had a standalone GPS device in a car, the giant cell phone. Now we've got smartphones, iPads. Most people don't have a desktop computer anymore and they think of a PC, they think of a laptop. We've got wearables of all sorts and we've got AI. What was interesting is when you had this study refreshed for 2025, what you see is an increase in the need for everyone to have assistive technology built into these technologies that we use every day. It was something like more 70% plus of people use or could benefit from assistive technology, and that includes a large number of people who don't identify as having any disability. So we're at the cusp of this AI moment and it's really exciting, but it's also really timely because we're also at a historical period where the population is aging and where technology has become more important to our everyday thriving.

And so we need these technologies to get better, to drive greater accessibility because there's a greater societal need for that.

Tony Stephens:

Truly, it's a Copilot for everybody. That's right. Yeah. Well, that is awesome. Jamie, thanks so much for taking time to just connect with us and really share so much of the exciting things taking place at Microsoft and sort of your path to get into that space. It's awesome knowing that there's someone with that lived experience sort of helping carry the torch within Microsoft. I mean, not just you on the team, but so many people on the accessibility team, others have lived experiences as well of just varying disabilities. And it just sort of shows that in terms of the value proposition of Microsoft, it's making the world a better place. So hats off to you and the whole team there that's doing this every day.

Jamie Dean:

Oh, thanks so much, Tony. It's our pleasure. And we take our responsibility very seriously and hey, thank you for everything that you're doing at AFB for the blind community, for the changing what it means to be perceived as blind and changing the blind experience.

Tony Stephens:

I'm like Rango and The Beatles. I'm just happy to be here, man. It's so exciting to grow up in all this stuff. Aaron, I don't know if you're the same way too, but just to be on the foreground of where this technology has been changing in our lifetimes, so much has happened over the past 15 years.

Aaron Preece:

Yeah, it's been pretty crazy to think about smartphones in 2009 to 2010 and now AI and really I guess 2020, 2022, something like that. Yeah.

Tony Stephens:

It's just starting too. We're still in the infancy. So all right. Well, again, thanks everybody for listening to Access World a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. Be sure to like and subscribe. And we've got some links here for Microsoft, their accessibility stuff as well. Jamie, are you on LinkedIn or anything like that? Can people-

Jamie Dean:

I am. It's the only social media platform where you'll find me, but I'm Jamie Dean on LinkedIn and feel free to follow or connect.

Tony Stephens:

Awesome. Well, again, thanks. And folks, we're looking forward to talking to you sooner than later as we're dropping more episodes each month than just our usual once a month. So you can go to afb.org/aw. In February, Aaron will have the new issue of Access World coming out. Is that right? Yep. Spring

Aaron Preece:

Issue on

Tony Stephens:

February 24th, I believe. And the focus for this upcoming issue, what's it going to be on?

Aaron Preece:

February is low vision and sort of new division loss/seniors, all kind of all together.

Tony Stephens:

We talked about Narrator, but we didn't get into the magnifier.

Aaron Preece:

Magnifier, yeah.

Tony Stephens:

Then on the Windows platform, that's great. It's another great tool for low vision users and just all the contrast and all the other elements that really, if you're using Windows, check out all the accessibility features there if you're blind or have low vision. There's a lot of cool stuff. But

Aaron Preece:

Again,

Tony Stephens:

Jamie, thank you so much. Check us out at afb.org/aw for AccessWorld, you can get all the back issues as we are now in our 26 year of Access World. We're past the 25th anniversary, so we got to figure out what 50 years is going to get us. Is that diamonds or gold or what? I don't know, man. So something. So we'll have to ask Copilot what exactly you get at 50 years. Give us something to work toward. Awesome. Jamie, thanks. And Aaron, we'll be talking again soon. You've been listening to Access World, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. Access World is a production of the American Foundation for the Blind, produced at the Pickle Factory in Baltimore, Maryland. Our theme music is by Cosmonkey, compliments of artless.io. To email our hosts, Aaron and Tony, email communications@afb.org. To learn more about the American Foundation for the Blind or even help support our work, go to www.afb.org.