Microsoft Shares ‘year in recap’ for accessibility

Last week, Microsoft marked the International Day of Persons with Disabilities by publishing a blog post in which the company detailed its “year in recap” for Windows accessibility. The piece was written by Akheel Firoz, a product manager at Microsoft.

“The Windows Accessibility team adheres to the disability community’s guiding principle, ‘nothing about us without us,’” Firoz wrote in the introduction to the blog post. “In the spirit of putting people at the center of the design process guided by Microsoft Inclusive Design, working with and getting insights from our advisory boards for the blind, mobility and hard of hearing communities is critical to creating meaningful and effective features that empower every single user.”

Firoz gives Windows’ Fluid Dictation feature top billing in the post, writing it’s “a feature designed to make voice-based text authoring seamless and intuitive for everyone, intelligently corrects grammar, punctuation and spelling in real time as you speak[and] this means your spoken words are instantly transformed into polished, accurate text, reducing the need for tedious manual corrections or complex voice commands.” He goes on to say users are able to leverage Copilot (on supported machines) to ensure custom vocabulary is recognized—all without the need for a network connection. At the heart of the enhancements made to Fluid Dictation is, as Firoz wrote, Microsoft’s desire to enable users to “focus on your ideas, and not the mechanics of text entry by minimizing errors and streamlining corrections when typing with your voice.”

Elsewhere, Firoz details improvements to Voice Access, “more natural and expressive voices” for Magnifier and Narrator, as well as efficient document creation with Narrator.

Although Microsoft, led by chief accessibility officer Jenny Lay-Flurrie, is institutionally committed to advancing accessibility for the disability community, it’s nonetheless worth pointing out the company’s blog post came out just one day before Tom Warren at The Verge reported Microsoft is “quietly walking back its diversity efforts.” Square those how you will, but I personally found the timing interesting if probably coincidental. As someone who has interviewed Flurrie several times, my strong suspicion is she’d riot were Microsoft to walk back the accessibility efforts it has made.