FINISHED FILE
2017USBLN
20th ANNUAL NATIONAL CONFERENCE
ORLANDO, FLORIDA
AUGUST 22, 2017
TECHNOLOGY PLENARY
3:15 P.M. ET
Services Provided By:
Caption First, Inc.
P.O. Box 3066
Monument, CO 80132
1 877 825 5234
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This text is being provided in a rough draft Format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) or captioning are provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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> Welcome, please find your seat, our program will begin momentarily.
Welcome, please find your seat.
Welcome USBLN Chief of Staff, Brian Horn.
BRIAN HORN: Good afternoon. How's everyone doing? Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed your breakout session, and we have an absolutely fantastic program for you this afternoon. It is our technology plenary, which is sponsored by Microsoft.
I first just want to thank Microsoft, Jenny and her entire team, really for helping us put together this technology track. It's the first time we've ever had a track dedicated to technology. It's something so important and we at USBLN are hearing from all of our corporate partners of how we do better in technology whether it's for employees or from customers or to make sure that the goods and services you're procuring are accessible.
We have a great panel today, and I'm not going to delay any longer. I have the pleasure of introducing Vice President of Corporate Affairs at Marriott International and USBLN board member, Apoorva Gandhi.
(Applause)
APOORVA GANDHI:
Good afternoon, everybody. This is it's always hard during this session between a crowd and happy hour. Is that right? I'm so glad you guys came back. They were saying back stage where is everyone? I said don't workshoppy`, it's those mondo sized cookies out there. Did you see those? They're like cookie monster sized cookies, I love them. Can you feel the buzz in the air. Are you having a good time so far, give it a round of applause if you are. This conference gets bigger and bigger every year. I love it. Thanks so much being an important part of this. It's just so great to see. Before we get started, let's take a quick pause and do an accessibility check. Is everyone good? If you need something to just raise your hand or make a sound or let someone know in the best way you know how. Everyone good? We're good? Okay. Good.
We got the Marriott team, we're ready. At the ready. We want to make sure everyone has a great stay. I do want to take a moment before we get started. I want to recognize someone.
You know, this guy Brian Horn, isn't he awesome? There he is.
I love this guy.
You know, I've noticed when Brian is around, stuff just gets done. It's amazing. It's like you know, he's like Jill Houghton's hit man. It's true, it's awesome. Here's a little secret. I'm actually kind of afraid of him! You're a rock star, Brian, I know you know that but I wanted to tell you. Thanks for everything you're doing. Hey, listen guys. We have what I consider to be the all star team, I'm telling you, this is going to knock your socks off, this group here.
It's really the Titans of high tech. And I want everyone to just take this idea with them. Walk out with one new thing today. Is that cool. Make an agreement we're going to listen, write one new thing and go back to all your companies and you're going to tell them what that one new thing you learned is. Is that cool? They're next time they're going to send five more people, they're going to get five more new things and get bigger and bigger and bigger, do we have a deal? Okay, all right. So let's go ahead and let's have our great panelists come on out. Are they there? Otherwise you're going to be talking to me the whole time. You don't want that. You don't want that. There they are. Let's give them a round of applause.
All right.
I'm just going to give you a quick little introduction to this team. First of all, we have Jennison Asuncion on the far far right there. Your right. Who's an engineering manager who directs LinkedIn's access efforts and managing a team of software engineers who support that. His goal is to make it so business cards have no place in today's society because LinkedIn is making it. We don't need business cards. Hey man, I'm on link LinkedIn, you find me, right? He spent seven years on Royal Bank of Canada's IT accessibility team in Toronto. Here's what I love about this guy. In his free time, he cofounded Global Accessibility Awareness Day in 2012 which is a day dedicated to get the mainstream tech community to talk about and experience digital access and inclusion through in person and virtual activities around the world. Which I think congratulations for doing that. We really appreciate the work.
And you know, I mentioned he works for LinkedIn. He spent a lot of time in Canada. And yes, ladies, or gentlemen, he can help get Justin Trudeau to accept your friend request. He has ways, doesn't he. Right next to him is Dr.Ruoyi Zhou who is at IBM. Her responsibilities include developing technology and tools to enable accessibility for IBM's products, solutions, and services.
She creates assistive technologies for people with special needs. And leads Internet of things based cognitive solutions for aging.
Prior to joining IBM, she was a research scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory where she studied research process and characterization of high temperature super conductors. I know, amazing, right? I don't even know what that means. And if that is not enough, she received a Ph.D. in material sciences from Rutgers university. She has over 30 publications and is recipient of several patents. She is the pride I know two things, she's the pride and joy of big blue and I'm feeling real eye dumb when I hear her bio, she's amazing. We're really happy to have you here. Let's give her a round of applause
RUOYI ZHOU: Thank you.
(Applause).
APOORVA GANDHI:
We also have Mr.Jeff Wieland who is director accessibility at Facebook. His team is responsible for making it possible for anyone regardless of ability to access the connections that happen on Facebook. He's cofounder of a group trawled Teach Access which is an academic and industry partnership to embed accessibility in educational programs for students of technology. He has spent the last five years building out Facebook's engineering and operations accessibility programs.
And routinely speaks about how to conquer the challenges of accessibility at scale.
Now I mentioned that Facebook calls him their director of accessibility. I call him the king of "likes". So is everyone going to post something on Facebook about how great this panel is today?
And you know, lastly, the woman who needs no introduction
JENNY LAY-FLURRIE: You're terrifying me right now.
APOORVA GANDHI:
There's people who go by one name. We all know people in society, right? There's Madonna, Cher, there's Jenny.
(Laughter)
Right?
(Applause).
Right?
Jenny. I think we should just no more Jenny LayFlurrie, just Jenny. That's what it is for the rest of the conference. So one name, we're all going to get Tshirts.
JENNY LAY-FLURRIE: No! No, you're really not.
APOORVA GANDHI:
Do a dance routine. Please? No? We're not? All right. The great thing about Jenny "jenny" is she has a passion to see people of all abilities reach their full potential. That's something important to her. She's the Chief Accessibility Officer at Microsoft.
She's the head of the Board of Directors for USBLN. And she really leads the efforts there to drive great products, services and Web sites that serve to empower people and organizations to achieve more. You guys know who she is. Her team does amazing, amazing work.
And she was recognized as a champion of change by the White House.
And you know, not only is she the Chief Accessibility Officer at Microsoft, she has a Ph.D. in a very important major called GSD. You guys know what that is? You say someone has a Ph.D. in GSD? Means they're really good at getting Shi done.
As she does.
All right.
I told you we're going to have fun today, right?
JENNY LAY-FLURRIE: Who gave him the microphone?
APOORVA GANDHI:
You knew what you were getting into.
Okay. So one thing we want to do is I know you guys are grog to have a going to have a ton of questions, we want to take time and start formulating questions. I know they're out there and then we'll have roving microphones and stuff like that so we can make sure we answer what's on your minds. Okay?
All right.
Well, let's get started here.
So Jeff, let's start with you, my friend. Everyone's on Facebook. 100 times a day if not even more.
But let me ask you a question. What role does technology play in your company in helping the workplace be more inclusive and productive? And let me preface it because we hear about workplace regulations. We hear about people having accommodations. But let's talk about technology and Facebook how does it help to make things more inclusive and productive so everyone can make a contribution?
JEFF WIELAND: Yeah, so before jumping into that question, first off, thanks for the very festive intro remarks. Thank you, Jenny and USBLN, for having us here for this talk. It's really cool to be up here with all these panelists talking about the intersection of business and technology and accessibility.
So at Facebook we currently serve about 2billion people worldwide. Certainly that's a very diverse population that we're trying to serve.
And the goal is really to connect everybody in the world. So that diversity is only going to increase over time.
I think one of the best things that we can do in order to make sure that we are building products that anyone can use and accommodates that diversity is really make sure that we employ a diverse workforce, that sort of matches the diversity that we're building for. And I think the only way that we can do that is if we use and build technologies internally that are accessible, that allow people to succeed in whatever job they have at Facebook. So one of the interesting trends over the past couple years is more and more Facebook found itself using its consumer products to actually manage things like internal communication and project planning and road mapping.
Things like chat and messenger and groups which are all features some of you may know.
So sort of recognizing that we're using the product more and more for internal communication and workrelated things, we actually spun up an engineering group to think about formalizing that and in the past year and a half or so we launched a product suite called workplace. Workplace is our attempt to codify all those systems that allow us to communicate and sort of manage information flow at Facebook. And one of the nice things is that for the fast five years we've been working on making our consumer products very accessibility and a lot of that work carried through into the product in the workplace suite which is great which means that that platform is sort of out of the box quite accessible given all that past work. So that's the product that Facebook uses to manage all its internal communication and it's now a product that a lot of outside organizations are using as well
And so one example that I think is relevant in the face of accessibility is it's been really cool to see disability advocacy organizations adopt workplace as the platform that they're using for organizational communication.
So one example of that is the Royal National Institute of Blind People in the U.K. They're now a workplace partner and using that to manage their own workplace and communication. For us it really starts with making sure that the tools we build internally are as accessible as possible so we can hire the diverse workforce we need to grow the business and connect everybody in the world
APOORVA GANDHI:
So Facebook live is catching fire, it already has caught fire. It's something on my feed I see people using it a lot. Is your team charged with making sure that's as accessible as it can be?
JEFF WIELAND: Yeah, so we certainly work on some of the features in the space of accessibility. But at the scale Facebook is at now, there are tons of product teams who are driving accessibility work through and making sure that their services and experiences are as accessible as possible. Think about Live in particular a lot of work we've done to improve the accessibility of Live is making sure we have great captioning tools for people using Facebook Live and something we just launched in the past year was the ability for Livestreamers to work with caption vendors to do realtime captioning for Livestream which is really cool. And I think very much a game changer for the streaming space.
But there's a lot of work being done for video in general at Facebook. And yeah, I think it's an exciting place for accessibility.
APOORVA GANDHI:
That's great. You get 100 "likes". All right, my dear Jenny, I want to get your take on it. Don't look at me with that look.
Afraid look. All seriousness, Microsoft has done some so much great work about inclusivity. And you've been a huge leader in that area. Same question for you. What role does technology play at Microsoft in terms of making the workplace more inclusive for folks of abilities of all types?
JENNY LAY-FLURRIE: You know, I think if you're going to produce any product, we all work on machines, right? When I first joined the workplace, that wasn't necessarily the case, which ages me. And I think the evolution of the PC on every desk which was actually Bill Gates' mission when he formed Microsoft, is very much realized. There is a machine on every desk. May not be a PC. Fruity devices are also allowed. I do think that's changed the way that we need to change the way we think about technology. It's a tool that we all use every single minute and every hour of every single day.
And so as we produce those things, it's just a bloody core requirement that everything that we produce, whether that is a Web site, a version of Office, Windows, can be used by every person, including people with disabilities.
And I think that's something that's taken absolutely deadly seriously
And I think it really does enable us to do smart things.
We definitely are a company where we've been investing in accessibility for a long time.
We've recently rearchitectured about 18 months ago. And so we rearchitected. And that's my crew and my crew is one of several. We have four products divisions at Microsoft. Every division has leads. And their goals are to at bare minimum achieve compliance but go way above that. And that really is the goal and that's the opportunity is not to enable but to empower, go above. I firmly vehemently, if you haven't gotten that already, believe that's the role that technology can play.
I love the fact that we've got captioning. In fact, there's a couple I saw the slides come up. We've got a couple of things that are now just core and part of Office that empower me as a person with a disability and Jessica, I think, is the first one if we want to bring those up.
APOORVA GANDHI:
I think we have a few slides.
JENNY LAY-FLURRIE: One of them is employment designer. We all have PowerPoint and slides. Slides can be a little bit of a pain to build, right? You import a bunch of pictures, format them, size them, fiddle them, lots and lots of clicks, you've got to make them look cool and professional and kind of sassy and that's a lot of clicks.
And a lot of time.
And also if you've got someone who has mobility dexterity, that can also mean increased time. You've got to level the playing field. This is one click wonder, you bring in your pictures, one click, you've got professional slides. Right?
And it's one example of a few that just as you build these into your products, your employees, your customers, both benefit.
The other translator, which is the captioning stuff. If you click on "add subtitles" in PowerPoint, it will add realtime captioning to your PowerPoint right there and then
APOORVA GANDHI:
Really?
JENNY LAY-FLURRIE: Yep. It's to the point where me as a wonderful deaf person, cool deaf person can actually rely on them and occasionally they add Snafus and I actually think they add to the conversation.
(Laughter)
Because it's bloody unpredictable what it's going to be. But it's based on AI and it learns as it's doing it and it corrects. Last I'll put up is accessibility checker and this is the biggest one for us we're learning a lot about.
And you know, sect checker used to be sect accessibility checker used to be in the depths hidden in Office and nobody could find it. You click on it and it tells you is your document, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, email going to be able to be read by everyone person you're sending it to. Tells you what's wrong and how to fix it. We moved it next to spell check, increased use five times overnight by the way, just by moving it. Not surprisingly.