>> There's no question that 2020 has been a challenging year.
We have had to learn, adapt,
and persevere in the midst of the most difficult of circumstances,
people with disabilities have
disproportionately been impacted by the pandemic.
This has amplified the importance of accessible technology
for more than one billion people
with disabilities around the globe.
As we mark National Disability Employment Awareness Month,
it's a time to celebrate
the contributions of people with disabilities in the workplace,
and a call to action for all of us to create
a more inclusive workplace and build products that
reflect the diverse experience of our customers.
Inclusion leads to innovation.
The more we understand deeply how to empower everyone,
is when we can, in fact,
advance technology to benefit everyone that much more.
Today I want to introduce you to five of my colleagues to share
how they're using accessible technologies to thrive in their jobs.
>> I am a senior Accessibility Program Manager at Microsoft.
I help teams make their sites
accessible so that people with disabilities can use them.
I have low vision and that means I don't
know what my eyesight will be like from one day to the next.
So I use magnifier that's built right into Windows,
and that helps me read the documents that people send me.
I also use customizations to my pointer for my mouse,
and I've adjusted the color and
the size so that I'm able to locate it anywhere on the screen.
It's all about access.
>> I am the Global Account
Payable Manager based out of Redmond, here at Microsoft.
Account payable touches every part of the business.
There isn't anybody in the company who doesn't generate
something that needs to be paid in one way or another.
I am completely deaf.
I don't hear anything.
I am also late-deafened,
which mean that I was previously
hearing and then became deaf later in life.
I am on team all the time,
all day long for meetings, group meetings, one-on-one.
Teams really has one of
the best captioning models that are out there on the market.
I can use it in meetings.
I can use it for outbound phone calls,
and most recently I can even use it for inbound phone calls.
For a deaf individual who voices for themselves such as me,
this is a lifesaver. It's a gamechanger.
>> I'm a customer success manager in
the healthcare and life science industry.
That could be meeting and doing product demos.
It also could be just trying to forecast
in terms of what do I need for that particular business,
really depends on the day.
My analytics enables me to look at data over time.
What that means is because I have
anxiety at times I tend to lose focus,
or be really nervous when a big meeting comes up, for example.
I'm able to schedule some time for focus,
but I'm also able to see over time how did I trend.
Am I spending more time on meetings
or creating documents when I should be doing something else?
Allows for me to be able to pivot where I need
to or continue on if I'm doing a great job.
>> Part of what I do as part of my job
is I have responsibility for helping skill our employees,
and then also skill our customers and partners on our technology.
Part of what we really do is also think about how
we build accessible products.
I have dyslexia, and my two favorite features that I
like to use are editor and spell check.
The reason for that is that those are
things that are really hard for me to do,
and I also know how important it is to have
your work not have
spelling errors and to be grammatically correct.
The tools enabled me to actually do that without spending
all of my mental energy trying to get it
correct from a grammatical and spelling perspective,
and I can actually spend my energy
on the content and what we're trying to say.
>> I get to spend a lot of my time in developer tools,
Visual Studio, VS code,
and working with the Azure portal.
I 'm a quadriplegic from a football injury in college.
That's made it obviously very difficult to
operate a traditional mouse and keyboard.
What I use in its instead is this headset mouse,
you can see which tracks my head movements on the screen.
The white puffs switch allows me to click,
and then in conjunction with that,
I use the on-screen keyboard built into Windows,
which allows me to just point my head
at letters and click that way.
Whether I'm writing an email or writing code in Visual Studio,
I can do that very quickly
with the combination of those two technologies.
> Thank you, Angela, Corey, Greg, Kim,
and Lex for sharing your stories,
and for the passion and the ingenuity you bring to your work.
We can't talk about
National Disability Employment Awareness Month without
acknowledging the impact of this economic crisis.
One in five workers with
disabilities in the US has lost their job due to the pandemic,
significantly more than the national average.
Each of us can take action to drive change
by recognizing the many talents and
contributions of the people with disabilities by creating
more inclusive work environments and investing
in innovation that powers a more accessible world.
You can learn more about our work here,
and I hope you'll join us on this journey.
Thank you very much.