All Things Microsoft Cloud: Accessibility

Key Takeaways

hi everyone welcome back to all things microsoft cloud video series my name is achibosh i'm a cloud advocate at microsoft and i have donna and dan with me hi dan but what we're going to talk about today well we have donna here as our special guest to talk about accessibility within the microsoft cloud but you know before we jump into that donna tell us about yourself hello it's good to see you again we got homework don't you worry okay my name is donna sarkar i lead the accessibility tech team for microsoft so what that means is that i sit in the central hub within the organization within all of microsoft and i look after all of our 4 000 products and our 3 500 internal products so looking at like the time off tool for example the expense tool and all of these like vital things but overall i look after 7 500 products across the microsoft suite it's a lot of products um but i will tell you my favorite space is looking at dev tools and citizen dev tools because by making sure those are accessible you're actually enabling the next generation of people to become developers and citizen devs so that's been my individual contributor let's say focus and i love love where all of us are headed in that direction wow this is very cool and we know that uh developers are really into building solutions in cloud and microsoft cloud in general how does accessibility fit into the microsoft cloud story okay i'm so happy you asked this because it's kind of this overarching lord of the rings situation okay where the microsoft cloud is of course like you know azure power m365 name a cloud all the clouds but accessibility fits in across all of them because we can't have a microsoft cloud that's not accessible that would be weird right because you're saying pretty much if you do that you're saying we don't actually care about like 1.5 billion people that's less good um so accessibility kind of plugs into each one a place that people already think of accessibility is an m365 because that suite of products is really useful in offices so people with disabilities tend to be this job called a knowledge worker so that means they're experts at like excel or word or powerpoint or that sort of thing they use teams to communicate you know office suite outlook the whole thing so m365 is pretty much solved when you're looking at azure that's when things get interesting because every azure service we implement is accessible by design now so i don't know if you know but the azure portal is known as a delightful experience for screen reader users that's great yeah they got they they've gone through this entire process of working with screen reader users to make sure that it's accessible by design from the beginning so azure portal and then of course you know i'm super super biased but the par platform as well is accessible for folks who may have a screen reader needs may have limited mobility but accessibility touches every single part of the microsoft cloud and when you're building a new service or whether you're connecting services together it's really important to think about how will a person who might be a screen reader user a keyboard shortcut user a captions user be able to use my product or this you know content that i'm creating that's great to hear i uh i have a son with some disabilities and so our focus on getting that right i like i actually didn't know about the portal what you mentioned and that's you know that's great to hear i'm all for it so it's great to hear um when it comes to if i am a developer i mean obviously i can try to do my due diligence to make sure my apps are accessible and things like that but what are some scenarios you can think or tell us about that would help me as a developer maybe expand into things i haven't even thought of before so one of the things to keep in mind is you don't actually know who's going to build who's going to use the app or the web page or the web app or whatever it is that you're building right we seem to think that people with exactly our own set of skill sets are going to use this thing right so there's some really obvious things like colorblind people one in seven men one in seven one and twelve something some small number are colorblind so if you rely on your app's colors to dictate things you're actually putting a lot of people at disadvantage right you're saying like hey you know click on the red button people like what is that so you also want to label it red you know something like that so that's a really obvious one and we've realized that more people are colorblind than we even think do you know many men didn't even know they're colorblind until they started changing colorblind filters and windows and saying like wait i can't actually see this there's no difference to me between green and blue am i colorblind we hear this all the time it happens constantly my colleagues right this happens to my colleagues our customers so the number of people who are discovering that they have like some sort of disability it's not a bad word it's just a fact no not at all um that's very very common so that's an example another one is when you think about people who may have had like an accident or like you know they broke their wrist i i got a ping recently from one of our product managers saying i broke my wrist i have to use dictation i also have to use keyboard shortcuts with this hand because i can't use a mouse help and i said okay cool so you're using accessibility features and they're like okay cool this is so interesting and a big part of it is can you navigate your entire app with keyboard right can you because if you can do that you can navigate with voice and that's really really compelling it's quite interesting um and it's really a bunch of basic simple things like make sure every object has a label that's identifiable make sure there's a logical tab order for every single element on your app because if you're not making these things accessible like reachable by technology that's not a mouse you're leaving out an enormous part of the audience yeah the other just practical thing is if you put name values on things and have logical tab orders if you're going to run any sort of automation like ui automation you can also do that fairly easily for testing your app it becomes much much easier i don't no one knew this right and so those are some logical things um this manifests itself whether you're using it building like a net app or a power app or anything like that just make sure that every single thing on your in the screen that is visible is accessible by keyboard and that you can uh tab through it in a logical order well an interesting thing there real quick to wrap up is i don't know if as a developer either of you have tried but you probably have try to use like visual studio vs code whatever one day like not use a mouse right and you can yeah um and it's amazing actually how much i don't know more productive you feel once you get those memorized now i have to admit i still love my mouse and i still use it but um it's good that you could do that yeah you could definitely do that um one other thing i'll tell you is we're just at the beginning of this accessibility for dev's work because we're realizing that the more accessible you make devtools the more accessible products you're going to create right because when you empower people with disabilities such as your son and so many of my colleagues to become developers or citizen developers the products they're going to make are kind of going to be accessible by design because it's working for them so it broadens the net of people we bring into our workforce and the number of people who can be devs in the first place so that to me has been really fascinating but i've been messing around a lot and you two should try this with github copilot okay i think copilot is probably one of the greatest accessibility tools in the world and we don't think about it that way right so imagine you can now dictate a line of code and it auto completes for you it's pretty cool so i use windows h and get and copilot and i can dictate lines and lines and lines of code which is very fascinating and when i have my some of my voice coder friends get access to it they're like this is a game changer this completely changes so much of my workflow so i'm not having to dictate every line of code but getting so much you know for free same with screen reader users so yeah so copilot's like absolute game changer we're at the very very beginning of it i'm sure that there are a lot of things that we can do to make our apps more accessible so where's the place we go as developers to learn more about accessibility so i'll say that one thing oh cool party trick by the way if you're building a web app you can put immersive reader into it okay so what immersive reader does is it's like that edge read aloud thing where it will highlight any word make it big and read it out loud to you so say you're building a web app and you want to put in like dyslexic mode you embed the immersive reader azure service into it it's just like this many lines of javascript uh right into your into your web app it's pretty cool i i did this as a demo for in like five minutes and everybody in this conference it wasn't it was a disability conference it's like what is this magic i said no no it's an azure service and it's not actually magic it feels magical though right because when you can have any any web app that you write read aloud to you in you know dyslexic mode or like i speak a foreign language mode right it's immensely helpful for so many people so check that out uh check out the immersive reader azure service uh it's my favorite i'm dyslexic so that's why so you're asking in terms of resources we are like to be honest gathering up a bunch of resources and also creating a whole new batch of resources so i'll have a much better answer for you in six months but right now i would love for everyone to check out ms dev dash accessibility and you can see a url here right at the bottom well thanks so much for joining us great to chat with you donna that was some amazing wisdom on accessibility and i'm so glad to hear that so many of the products that was it 7 500 or something like that you oversee i'm glad you oversee them because you're obviously very passionate about this oh yeah it's okay so i will leave you with one thing everyone will become become disabled at some point or another just some of us beat you to it so build the world you want to see right as devs we are control freaks let's build the world we plan to live in some day thank you so much thanks everyone for joining us in the all things microsoft cloud we'll see in the other videos