As artificial intelligence continues to reshape industries, ensuring an inclusive approach has become a pressing concern for IT leaders. During an interview at the recent Business Disability Forum Global Conference, Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Microsoft’s Chief Accessibility Officer, shared her insights on creating technology that accommodates all users. The discussion with Diane Lightfoot, CEO of the Business Disability Forum, emphasized the importance of patience in the journey toward inclusivity in technology.
Lay-Flurrie stressed that immediate returns on investments in accessible tech are unlikely, acknowledging that even a company as well-resourced as Microsoft does not always achieve perfection on its first attempt. “When you have the scale and volume of products that Microsoft does, there’s no way we can go after perfection,” she stated. “We really are after progress day after day and continually listening to feedback.”
Establishing strong listening systems is crucial, Lay-Flurrie noted, as it’s impossible to identify every accessibility issue without input from users. Once foundational elements, such as proper skilling and training, are in place, businesses can focus on harnessing innovation potential. “It’s about making sure you’ve got a solid foundation and investing in that,” she explained, “and then working through strategically how to connect it all the way from your mission down into the core of the products, no matter what your products are.”
As AI capabilities expand, responsible deployment becomes essential. Lay-Flurrie highlighted the need for clear principles and rigorous controls to ensure disability inclusion in both training data and output results. Collaboration with ethics teams is vital to establish guardrails that can prevent AI systems from perpetuating bias or exclusion. She shared a striking statistic: 50% of accessibility bugs in production stem from the design phase. “Organisations are creating problems before development even begins,” she cautioned. The solution, she argued, lies in “shifting left,” which involves integrating accessibility into products from the outset rather than addressing issues post-launch.
AI tools like GitHub Copilot can facilitate this shift by assisting developers in writing more accessible code while simultaneously promoting better practices. “We need to shift left so that we are building by design,” Lay-Flurrie insisted. “We all know that theory. We need to make sure that the actual technology delivers on it, and AI gives us the opportunity to do it.”
The rapid pace of AI advancements presents an urgent requirement for widespread training, especially for disabled individuals who stand to gain the most from AI-enabled features. Lay-Flurrie, who is deaf, recounted her experiences with accessibility tools such as real-time captioning, transcription, sign detection, and automated meeting notes, which have evolved significantly over the past two decades. These innovations could fundamentally alter career opportunities for disabled workers by removing long-standing barriers and facilitating access to new roles. However, achieving this potential requires making training free, affordable, and accessible.
While AI holds promise for enhancing career opportunities for many, it also introduces challenges, particularly regarding unrealistic and often negative portrayals of disabled individuals through AI-generated imagery. Most large language models (LLMs) are trained on publicly available images, which often depict disabilities in a negative light, thus influencing the output of AI tools in a way that reinforces stigma and stereotypes.
Lay-Flurrie explained how Microsoft has been actively working to improve the representation of disability in its AI systems. “One of the biggest issues was the injection of disabled imagery that were being prioritized at the right level,” she remarked, adding that the company has collaborated with organizations like Little People of America and The Kilimanjaro Blind Trust to address this problem. “We’ve been able to incrementally launch and embed that data with the right rules and guardrails around it to make sure that if you want to create your own prompt, you’re going to get more realistic, representative, and authentic results.”
Despite her progress in improving Microsoft’s AI imagery output, Lay-Flurrie expressed concern over the accessibility of the digital landscape. “The statistic that keeps me up at night is that only 4% of the world’s websites are accessible today. I think we missed this with the first technology wave,” she admitted. However, she remains hopeful about the future of disability inclusion in businesses worldwide.
“We have this enormous responsibility to make sure that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past and we learn from them,” she said. “If we do, I think we can see this wave of features and inclusivity and possibility that could finally impact some of the statistics like the unemployment, underemployment, and the availability of societal constructs. There is possibility here to impact these if we get it right, but I do think we need to lean in. Success requires active stewardship and sustained investment.”
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