Jenny Lay-Flurrie: Accessibility has become an avenue for innovators, makers, developers to really channel energy and create something that can empower people in a very meaningful way.

Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Chief Accessibility Officer at Microsoft talks to Business Today about how she is driving the culture of accessibility to help the tech firm in its mission to empower the one billion plus people with disability around the world and help them achieve more.

Jenny Lay-Flurrie: If you look at the demographics of disabled, which is what has kept me grounded, is that there has been a significant increase in the disabled over the last several years and it is correlated with age and employment rate. I think it hasn’t materially shifted in 30 years.  Even in the states where we have the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) in place it still doubled out at people without disabilities. And then I look at things like mental health, which is going to impact 82 per cent of us at some point in our lives at times.

So, one, you’ve got this really big need for technology to be able to help as a partner and it’s an area where there has been a lot of investment across space but there is clearly a lot more that can be and should be done.

The opportunity really is to design through the lens of disability, using inclusive design principles to make sure that it benefits those with disabilities and to create solutions for not just helping people with disabilities but also end up helping everyone. That’s the big thing about accessibility that isn’t really well understood that it isn’t designing for the few, but this is designing for the many.  Take the example of captioning – my family here in Seattle loves captioning and they are not deaf. They love it because they pick up words and accents. That sort of paints the picture for the opportunity in this space.