A Decade of Building for Everyone

Ten years ago, Accessibility at Microsoft started a new chapter. It began with a blog. Brad Smith announced “new steps to strengthen Microsoft’s work to make our products more accessible and better serve people with disabilities.” That moment set change in motion: we built a new centralized accessibility team in his organization, embedded technical leaders across engineering, and I (nervously) stepped into the role of Chief Accessibility Officer. Together with leaders across the company, we formed the Accessibility Leadership Team (ALT) and got started.

Our goal then, and now, was simple: ensure that “the voices of our customers who care about accessibility are heard across Microsoft, and that our products and services better meet their needs.” What I didn't expect was the response. A mix of kindness, and excitement. Within a few weeks, I was overwhelmed with people reaching out with ideas, feedback, and offers of assistance.

We didn’t start from scratch. By 2016, our disability employee community was already strong, and the Disability Answer Desk (DAD) had launched in 2013 and was becoming a critical source of insight, with a third of all contacts coming from blind and low vision customers. It’s humbling to think DAD has since handled over two million contacts, fueling thousands of product fixes and features.

We’ve learned a lot over these past ten years by listening, adapting, and yes, sometimes failing. Thousands of people have played a part in the journey. Through it all, we have never wavered in our commitment to build a more accessible future for all. This is a journey that continues, but it’s always good to pause, and think about what we have learned. And share back a little of the learned wisdom that was given so freely to me as I came into this role. It’s hard to pare it down, but got it down to four:

1. Moving from intent to accountability
2. Understand the importance of customer feedback
3. Embrace technology’s evolving impact on accessibility
4. Encourage innovation – and have fun in the process!

1. From intent to accountability: In 2016, Microsoft employed ~114,000 people; by 2025 that number was ~228,000. Scaling accessibility needed new muscle. We put in a hub and spoke model with a central team defining standards, policy, and engineering requirements, and dedicated accessibility leaders embedded in product groups to deliver. The hub verified and coached; the spokes owned execution. A partnership — sometimes tense, always mission driven — between accessibility experts and teams accountable for shipping accessible products.

We made transparency and accountability core operating principles, and (in Ted Lesso style) wrote ‘Under promise, over deliver’ above our office door. That commitment was in everything we published, from Accessibility Conformance Reports (ACRs) for our products to roadmap blogs that detailed launches, with as much ‘how to’ information as possible. Slowly, we started to move from good intentions to a systematic, engineering-driven approach that could scale thousands of products, buildings, internal tools, and websites. Over time, this basic structure has raised the maturity of accessibility across the company.  Training is mandatory for employees (98% of employees have completed), and we’ve added Accessibility Fundamentals learning path on Microsoft Learn so anyone can adopt and adapt it (6 million so far). Every employee, aware of their accountability to build accessibly. Is it perfect? No. But it's progress. Accessibility is a system and a culture. Measure, listen, and improve.

2. Understand the importance of customer feedback: My favourite moments have always been with the disability community, listening to what’s working and what’s not. “Nothing about us without us” is not just a phrase, it’s a design principle and critical for accessibility. Our customer engagement and feedback programs are crucial to our approach. They have evolved as technology and company has matured.

Disability Answer Desk, 13 years later this remains a critical channel. We added ASL direct video technical support so deaf customers could connect in their primary language (which Marlee Matlin helped us promote!) and partnered with Be My Eyes, a free third-party app for the blind and low vision, to speed up support for customers. Added a channel for enterprises (ITPro’s) and kept the service free, and wherever possible, available 24/7. Today, 60% of issues are resolved by AI, quickly and efficiently, without waiting to speak to an agent. If someone pings me asking what technology to use, new to disability through accident or injury, DAD is one of the first places I send folks.

Community to lab to product. Insights from our disability employee community and partners continue to shape what we build, how we build it and drive lived experience–led innovation. The Microsoft Inclusive Tech Lab in Redmond has welcomed 25,000+ visitors, running tours and sprints that connect engineers with lived experience and eliminate unintentional exclusions before ship. Partnerships with NGOs such as Disability:IN, ONCE, the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), and many others continue to shape where we invest, prioritize and collaborate. Said back in 2016, we were 'better together', these programs have taken that from concept to reality.

3. Embrace technology’s evolving impact on accessibility. When I started at Microsoft 21 years ago as a (deceptively) deaf employee, I had to request CART captions or sign language interpreters 48 hours in advance for every meeting, and bandwidth (or CPU!) could make or break access. Today, some of the most powerful supports are built in—by default, on device, and in real time. I think about the change in technology over the last decade, and the impact of people – is material.

Today, captions and transcripts run locally across Windows and Teams with or without connectivity with little pull-on CPU. Teams has sign language mode and deaf-led team working to support deaf and hard-of-hearing use.  Blind and low vision colleagues can get meaningful, contextual descriptions of images and even audio descriptions of moving images. A decade ago, voice recognition struggled with nonstandard speech; today, models better understand diverse speech patterns, enabling features like Fluid Dictation to turn spoken words into polished, grammatically correct text instantly. Thousands of disabled people made this possible, partnering with non-profits and University of Illinois to train AI on their voices.

Progress driven by an army of accessibility professionals, methodically and thoughtfully working across the company to make features easier, better, and more impactful.

4. Encourage innovation – and have fun in the process. When we started our journey, I said we were going to do two things – 1. Push the limits of what’s possible and 2. Have fun while doing it. Design sprints and hackathon tents became the place to achieve both, small teams, leaning into inclusive design’s powerful principles: Recognize exclusion, solve for one and lastly, extend to many. Our hack culture has created some amazing technologies over the years.

In 2014, we had 10 Ability Hack projects; by 2017, that had grown to 150 projects and 850 people. This year, we had 260 project teams. We won the company hackathon twice in 2014 and 2015, their journeys captured in The Ability Hacks. And many others got started in hacks – Seeing AI, and the Xbox Adaptive Controller. SeeingAI launched in 2017 as a free app for blind and low vision and Xbox Adaptive launched in 2018 in partnership with organizations including like AbleGamers, Warfighter Engaged, and SpecialEffect— to enable 400M+ disabled gamers to play. There is a lot more hacking ahead, as we continue to explore what's possible with AI. The recipe will adapt, but include invention, accountability, and joy, where a sticky problem (+beanbag, pizza, and strong coffee) drives change. Humbling to think that many of the innovations from these forums continue to empower millions of people around the world.

To everyone who has helped shape the last 10 years in any way, big or small – thank you. Our north star remains unchanged: technology must empower everyone. But what has changed is the role accessibility now plays. It’s an engine that drives us forward. We continue to work to earn your trust by building with the community, reflecting real lives, and making progress one decision at a time.

The list is long. Onwards.