[MUSIC].
>> Hello everyone. I'm Dona Sarkar.
I'm the Principal Advocate for
the Power Platform Infusion Dev Teams here at Microsoft.
I also focus on
accessibility topics because they impact so many people.
I'm dyslexic, so I have
a firsthand interest in
making sure that our tech is fully accessible.
Today, I'm very excited to be
talking to my friend Florian Beijers,
who is based out of the Netherlands
and he's a dev at dexxIT.
We're going to have a dev productivity tools
throwdown because we're at Build.
Hello Florian, and welcome to Build.
Thank you so much for joining us this morning.
>> Thank you so much for having me.
Hello. You're coming in loud and clear.
>> Awesome. Please tell
the audience who you are and what you do.
>> I'm a developer, cybersecurity enthusiast,
I do a whole lot of different things.
I'm also an accessibility expert, and I consult
my expertise for that. Because I'm a Screader user,
I'm fully blind, and that's how I do all these things.
>> See, I love this so much because not
only do you use cool tech to do your job,
but you share what you've learned with other people.
They can just take your best practices rather than
having to go through the test iteration
endless process that sometimes this can take.
I really, really love your blog,
which everyone should go and check out by the way, and
your latest article about how accessible WSL2 is.
I bet you've got a ton of really good ideas on how
best to use some of our other favorite dev tools,
like VS Code and such.
>> Yeah, VS Code is definitely one I use a lot.
Actually, I can show you a bit on how I go about it
and how we got to the point where we
are right now. Shall I do that?
>> Please do, that's awesome. Let's do it.
>> When Visual Studio Code first came out,
it was very inaccessible.
You couldn't use it. It's pretty much what Atom is now.
This is a big crossroads where
VS Code really picked up
the pace and fixed it while Atom did not.
But at first, when I was asked by
various people if I could use
the Visual Studio Code for any particular work,
the answer was just a big fat no.
It had to do with the way
the accessibility was implemented,
it wasn't, basically, nothing read. I could type here.
I just wouldn't read it. If you
can't edit what you're editing,
you can't see what you're editing
while you're trying to edit things,
that makes editing a whole lot more difficult.
Fast forward a couple of years to
now and go to the VS Code in the present here.
A lot of things have been done.
It's quite a bit more accessible.
I would even dare say is quite the
most accessible programming editor
on the planet currently.
A lot of issues were picked up on GitHub.
I participated in quite a few of them to
give the screen-reader
user's perspective as
well as the Screader developer's perspective.
That means we now have things like autocomplete working.
It's control the console dot.
It'll give methods.
[SCREEN READING]
It can at times be a little bit verbose,
that's still being worked on,
but it definitely works.
It gives me parameter hints,
which is something I'm pretty sure
not any other editor currently
does on Windows, which is great.
It's really versatile because I can go into here,
my extensions, and I
can type any programming language and
this is going to give me extensions for it.
It tells me how many were found,
Python 2021; then, here's all the extensions.
That all works really smoothly.
I don't really have to fight with it.
That is what makes it good
because you need to be productive with these tools.
These tools are the ones you
use for your job, and you can't have
productivity hits when you're working with
a tool for your job,
because that's going to get you fired.
This is a really strong foundation
for a lot of tools to build on,
and tools have been building on it.
If you look, for example, at Arduino here,
this is the Arduino IDE, Arduino script here.
That used to be a Java program that was
really unwieldy and hard to use for Screader users,
now it's based on VS Code.
It's been quite a bit more fun to actually use.
This actually makes me want to experiment with it,
play with it, see what I can actually make it do.
Now it's actually usable.
That way it opens doors for people.
It gives people ways to employ themselves,
it gives people ways to experiment,
to learn, and speaking of learning,
Codecademy and freeCodeCamp
are both using the editor component for VS Code called
Monaco right now, which has made
their platform
significantly more accessible as well.
It can be quite a chain reaction
when one of these tools gets
accessible and really accessible
and people start picking it up.
A lot more doors start opening, and that's great.
Pretty much this all happened because of
the right people making
the right noise at the right people at the right time,
and those people picking that noise up and going with it.
Essentially, that's what's happened here.
We went from completely unusable
to most accessible editor on the planet,
and even now that's still being worked on today,
so, yeah. I don't work for Microsoft.
I'm not being paid to say this.
But seriously, what's been
happening here is groundbreaking.
>> Okay, wow. There's so
much to take away and unpack from that.
I'll point out three things
that I thought were very noteworthy.
One, thank you for showing us how screen reader
works with Visual Studio because I think
many people have never experienced that.
The way it goes through all of
the things in the list and calls things out,
that one was very, very interesting for me.
Second one, I loved that
parameter hints works because, oh my gosh,
what a dev productivity helper versus
trying to figure out like what were
the parameters, how many are there?
What should we keep in mind, etc? So glad that works.
Third, I am so grateful that you're
part of the Visual Studio Community and you've
spent all this time and effort
co-creating with them to help
build exactly the right tool that you
need to be maximally productive as a dev.
By doing that, you've helped
like millions of people all over the world.
Thank you so much for
all of the effort you put into on doing this.
>> Yeah, absolutely. It's been
a great journey and I've learned a lot,
but it's also just opened
a lot of doors for myself and others,
which is what I ultimately aim to do. It's been great.
>> Do you have any homework for the audience?
>> You've seen what this can do.
You've seen how accessible a tool can get.
I think if you all go home and
work on your own tools and add this accessibility,
it can be just as amazing, just as eye-opening,
just as door opening as VS Code
has been. Go do that.
>> I love that homework, Florian,
and it is so different than what anyone else has said.
Our dear Build audience,
look at what VS Code has done to empower more people to
use their products by opening
more doors and do the same for yours.
You can learn a lot about accessibility using
our Microsoft Learn five-minute learning path,
aka.ms/ accessibility-fundamentals.
Go try it out. Thank you so much
for joining us here in studio, Florian.
Have an amazing time at Build.