By Katie Deighton
Microsoft Corp. last week announced steps it plans to take in
the next five years to improve accessibility to people with
disabilities, promising to ramp up its development of related
technology, create opportunities for more of them to enter the
workforce and make its own workplace more inclusive for them.
The company declined to disclose financial figures or targets
related to the initiative, but said it aims to improve on previous
efforts that focused separately on products and the employee
experience with a more systematic approach.
Microsoft is known as one of the more inclusive companies in the
technology industry, with products including an adaptive Xbox
controller and initiatives such as hiring people with autism and
funding startups that use artificial intelligence to help people
with disabilities. The company is also one of the few that has a
chief accessibility officer, having created the role in 2010.
Jenny Lay-Flurrie assumed the post in 2016 as Microsoft
restructured the accessibility division to make it more central to
the company.
Ms. Lay-Flurrie, who is deaf and who initially hid her
disability by relying on lip reading, spoke to the Experience
Report by video call about her role and the moves she and others
with her remit should be making. This interview has been edited for
length and clarity.
WSJ: We see a lot of companies appointing an accessibility
leader but installing them perhaps further away from the big
decision makers. What kind of power does your job title give you
internally?
Ms. Lay-Flurrie: It does open doors. So when I reach out to
somebody [at Microsoft] and say, "So, where are we at?" I blow
through all those potential reactions of "Who is this?"
I would love to see a lot more CAOs, and not just in tech. It's
woefully lacking.
WSJ: Microsoft is a sprawling company. How is your team
positioned and structured to work within it?
Ms. Lay-Flurrie: We manage this thing like a business, so my
role is to motivate, to inspire, to help people see the vision and
the strategy, but also to hold them accountable for everything that
they do. I sit in the corporate, external and legal affairs team,
which gives me the opportunity to work all across the company, and
I have people I speak to assigned to every part of the company,
whether it's HR or it's Xbox.
WSJ: So how was accessibility built into Microsoft before?
Ms. Lay-Flurrie: The CAO was based in one of the product teams,
and it's very hard to tell every other product what to do when
you're sitting in one of them. And it didn't include either hiring
or customer-facing work, which I think is so important. You've got
to listen. I spend most of my time listening.
WSJ: Are you ever pushed to validate the return on investment
for the work you're doing?
Ms. Lay-Flurrie: There's always a conversation. But I'm also
very, very mindful of the ROI trap, which is, "Well, this product
will work great for only 4% of the customer base." The science of
accessibility and inclusive design is if you build it in by design,
and infuse the insights of people with disabilities, you're quite
simply going to get better stuff.
I don't think anyone could have quantified the impact of talking
books when they were created for the blind. And closed captioning
[automatic subtitles] went up for us on Teams significantly between
February and April last year. That wasn't just the deaf
community.
WSJ: Microsoft plans to hire more people with disabilities over
the next five years. How are you going about that?
Ms. Lay-Flurrie: It's making sure that we expand our dedicated
programs like our autism hiring program to different parts of the
globe. We're also expanding our supported employment practice,
which creates job opportunities for people with intellectual and
developmental disabilities.
And we're working on the accessibility of our buildings in a way
that's not just about meeting the letter of some local code.
You have to have a safe environment where people feel that they
can self identify, have a conversation about disability and ask for
what they need to be successful. Our global accommodations are
centralized, so no matter where you are in the world you can ask
for what you need to be successful and the cost is never seen by
your manager. So, for example, if you're deaf, you ask for an
interpreter and it'll be provided without a cap on price for
coverage.
WSJ: You're able to push through these kinds of changes in part
because you work for a large organization that is willing to spend
money on accessibility. How can smaller companies with less cash in
hand make similar improvements?
Ms. Lay-Flurrie: We've published our playbooks on things like
disability hiring, and the accessibility training every Microsoft
employee goes through, in the hope that they really help others
appreciate that this stuff is not hard.
Some of the simplest things you can do are things like making
sure you have different-colored furniture to your carpet or
flooring for people who are blind or low vision -- when the
furniture is the same color as the carpet, it's hard to
differentiate between them and you can easily trip. And making sure
that if you have glass doors, you put frosting on them.
Accessible by design means embedding accessibility, and the
insights of people with disabilities, into the design process. You
cannot just put a ramp on a building a week before you launch it
and cut the red ribbon.
Write to Katie Deighton at katie.deighton@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 03, 2021 06:14 ET (10:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)
Historical Stock Chart
From Feb 2024 to Mar 2024
Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2023 to Mar 2024