ROUGH EDITED COPY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
CIRCLE CAMPUS
DIGITAL ACCESSIBILITY EXPO
NOON SESSION A
MICROSOFT PRODUCT ACCESSIBILITY
12:00 p.m. - 12:30 p.m.
APRIL 9, 2009
CAPTIONING PROVIDED BY:
DILLON REPORTING SERVICES
100 NORTH LA SALLE STREET, SUITE 1500
CHICAGO, IL 60602
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This is being provided in a rough‑draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facility communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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>> KEVIN PRICE: All right. So we're going to get started with the next presentation. It's really very nice to have a number of vendors here to come in relatively short time to come and participate in our first UIC, the Disability Expo. And I'm very happy to be able to gather a couple folks from Microsoft corporation, Ralph Babusci and Chris Kabat who will talk a little bit about accessibility concerns and issues and how well it integrates within the Microsoft company. They have about 25 minutes to do this and I want to thank you very much for being here and please take it from here. Thank you.
>> RALPH BABUSCI: I'm going to start off by saying I'm not going to kill everybody through power points. I'll give you a chance to really understand what we're here to speak about today and kind of highlight a little bit more about technology. If we look at kind of why we're here today, today is really all about helping individuals with disabilities become more accessible to the technology as well as their surroundings. We conducted a research study with forester, and it shows 57 of computer users with technology would benefit from it if it were available to them. And one of the things, it was a very detailed in depth lab with having people of disabilities come into our campus in Washington and work very closely with Microsoft to see how they work, what types of things they do with the computers, and actually try to incorporate that into some of our development efforts. So again one in four users experience visual difficulties. One in four experience pain in the wrists and the hands. So some of those technologies today from joy sticks to mouse and some of the other keyboard devices we develop really come from these studies that we actually conduct. And then one in five has a hearing difficulty, as actually Chris does. So we'll talk more about some of the technologies that we've actually worked with to help generate some success in terms of technologies we provide.
In terms of planning, from our previous experience with XP to this stuff, we took an approach to really go back to see what was it in XP that was beneficial to people and what was lacking. And one of the things we noticed was the ability to actually understand you have technology in XP to help with certain issues, and that was one of the things we noticed right off the bat. People didn't know where to go to find accessibility features. People didn't know where to go in terms of turning them on, configure them. So instead of turning it around, how do we make this better to have people understand where those technologies are available to them. In fact, I have a personal story, a friend of mine, Chris, who's a developer for another organization, has cerebral palsy and actually can't type and can't move any of his extremities. And the only way he can communicate with you is through a technology that he uses a head wand is and it's basically a poke device that allows him to type into a keyboard and in that keyboard it has phrases and sentences he can put together. Chris is an architect and developer so you can imagine how difficult that might be in terms of actually pecking and poking for a technology that should be a lot easier for him to use. We brought him into our lab and worked with about 40 different technologies just for Chris to see what worked and what didn't work. In fact, a lot of the technologies you're going to see are things Chris worked with in making it more successful in the population at large. If you look at our previous work with XP, you can see it is confusing. Where do you find the accessibility features, where do you turn them on and make them work with you, as opposed to having you conform to the computer. And you'll notice that you had to go to the start menu in order to open up the control panel, open up a utility manager or actually navigate through a couple of different screens, find where the accessibility features were. It made it very difficult for people to understand that there were technologies available to them. They just didn't know where to find them. So what we ended up doing was taking all these different aspects of the control panel and all the other features from the menus and made it a little bit more accessible from an ease of access center. And this ease of access center is one place you go now to actually configure your PC to actually work with the characteristics you may need. So, for example, there's things that allow you to use your PC without a monitor, allowing you to use your PC without a keyboard or a mouse, so things for the most part that allow you to configure your PC to do a little bit more of what you use it for every day, this is going to allow you to use those features.
I'm not going to talk through most of them because Chris is actually going to show you what narrator does. We're also going to talk about magnifier and the on screen keyboard. You saw some of these technologies today by some of our partners. By no means is this a replacement for those technologies. This is just a subset of the functions you can get on your PC today that allows you to experience some of these features and functions that go a little bit further of some of the other functions. One of the benefits of a developers perspective ‑‑ how many do we have in the room today. All of the APIs and all the accessibility center are open for development, so you can actually figure extend even in the applications you're going with today some of the means that are available in the access center. So with that I'm going to turn it over to Chris and go ahead and get you started.
>> CHRIS KABAT: So one thing I just wanted to mention, I work for a company called NPS partners. We're very tight partners with Microsoft. It's just a company of ours called enablement. It helps people with disabilities, professionals with disabilities, get jobs in the IT field, either first coming into the IT field or returning to the IT field. So we help facilitate getting some of these tools in place, tools that Ralph talked about that their partners create. And one thing we've noticed is that with Vista, they can go to another person's machine and be very effective. So even though they don't have the tools they have all the time, maybe like jaws as a screen reader, there is narrator, if they're temporarily working on somebody else's machine. So if we want to get to the ease of access center, the easiest way to do it is hit the window key and U, and that brings up the ease of access center. So now we can see all the different features that we have. Magnifier is a feature that somebody who has vision impairments can actually bring up. And as they move their mouse across the screen, they can see information larger so it's a little easier to read. You can also undoc this. There we go. So you can undock this and use this kind of as a magnifying glass. So whatever your preference is, you can use that feature that way.
Another feature we have is the on screen keyboard. This would allow somebody to go in and use the mouse or arrow keys to use this keyboard, to get ‑‑ if they don't have access to the key bore or I believe some of the touch devices can help use this to navigate around windows Vista. We have the narrator, which is a screen reader, so we can use that.
"Initializing narrator. Narrator. Tech, tech, tech, location bar. Desk top. Back flash control. Panel back flash of access center. Focus on text. Welcome to the Digital Accessibility Expo. My name is Ralph from Microsoft. I have today Chris Kabat from ITS to show how windows can be set up to help individuals use their PCs more effectively."
So as you can see, it does a very good job of being able to read things on the screen as well as to type data into different windows. You can do that as well. As Ralph brought up before, a lot of the development tools, if you go in the visual studio, are built around these technologies as well. There are sections on say, buttons, when you're creating buttons on screens that interact with these features as well.
I'm not going to go into the high contrast. It's kind of hard to see on a projector. But another feature in here is a wizard, to kind of help you decide what features to use. So if I came in here and said get recommendations to make my computer easier to use, I can actually go in here and say, you know what? Lighting conditions make it difficult for me to use this computer, or I might have another type of vision, vision impairment. It will walk me through all these things, and then it will suggest which features I can use.
Some of the other features in here, you can see there's quite a few, use the computer without a display. This is narrator, so we talked a little bit about that as well as different things about how flashing visuals look, making it easier to see. I can set up the contrast ratios. Use the computer without a mouse or a keyboard. One of the nicer features of Vista is there's speech recognition. So if I go in here, I could start this up, and we can have this start up as things are going on, start listening. Open word. When I talk, it types. Correct types. Close. To. Okay. No.
So you can see there's a lot of features in how it does it. If there's things that don't work that well with this speech recognition, I can do things like say mouse grid. Mouse grid. Vibe. It actually narrows the mouse down to a particular part of screen, so you can use these features as well. Cancel.
There's also different settings around how the keyboard should respond. So if I have some dexterity issues where I might hit a key several times, I can tell it to not hit the key more than once within a certain period of time. And then we have a lot of visuals around. If video is supported, then it can show some of kind of the closed captioning that we see up there. So there's quite a few features that Microsoft built into the operating system for people to use for assistive accessibility. And one thing to point out is it's accessible right from the log in screen. So this isn't actually the log in screen. This is the same screen. You can see I have an access of ease right there. All I have to do is click that button and set up the experience specifically for me.
>> RALPH BABUSCI: So as you can see, we're actually trying as hard as we can to make things easier for individuals. We're also looking at how can we explore a little bit more about some of the other features and functioning within office. How can we make those better for people who actually understand and use, such as word. Is the text we're creating, is it more pleasing to the eye in terms of being able to read. And also dexterity. How do we control the ability to input things such as speech recognition and other means to put word documents, power point representations, and excel spread sheets together. So we're going that step beyond that we used to. And when windows comes out, it will have the same that we have in Vista today and again it will be extended when we get to the next windows time frame.
So thank you. Questions? We'll also answer questions.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: When I was presenting earlier, I asked about how does the narrator handle the smart text in power point, and I didn't know because I couldn't figure that out. It seems like smart text is an image compared to the words.
>> RALPH BABUSCI: So similar to what you saw in screen recognition technology, you'd have to set that up in order to understand that's a smart tag. Otherwise it just thinks it's an image. So there's ways of actually configuring it to understand smart tags as well as, you know how you tag items within word or power point, you have to actually teach it that that's a tag item as opposed to that's just an image file. And that's something you can do within the configuration. We can show that too.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Ralph, one question that came up earlier also was in terms of table PCs and which we support very heavily here on campus, and how inaccessible digital link is, and so what best practices do you have?
>> RALPH BABUSCI: So tablet PC, I've been using it for the last five years. One of the things that I actually put in front of my friend Chris who again had a disability was the ability to use a touch screen key, using his mouse and using his head wands, he needs to touch the different screen. One of the things we devised at that time was using the digital link input to be able to actually touch the spring and be able to read and write from the tablet. So using the tablet as a monitor as well as the PC and removing all the obstacles you had from that perspective. So we've been exploring digital link and working with tablet for the last five or six years, and that is a technology we will be carrying forward.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: And for those of you who haven't seen one, it's just a regular laptop that happens to be, you can rotate it around and then you can have an electromagnetic sensitive screen and you can write with a pen or some units now with your finger too. And you can draw on it. So I can have power point. I can be walking around projecting without wires and move around and do that sort of stuff. But that digital link and those annotations are the ones that want me to pay attention to.
>> RALPH BABUSCI: One of the things we've done is an application called one note. I don't know if you've actually played with one note but it works very well with the tablet PC in the sense that anything you inscribe on that tablet you can actually set up in a tablet format for the head of a meeting with subtabs to be used for different aspects of that meeting. And it understands or it picks up the written recognition from fluent writing in terms of actual script to, you know, to script that you actually write out, you know, each letter individually. So that technology again has been around for awhile. And that's one of the applications that we use every day is one note, and it's fantastic in terms of being able to actually understand written script from PC.
>> CHRIS KABAT: An application of one note is 9.95. And essentially it works with many more things that take advantage, particularly with tablet PC. But you don't have to have a tablet. It's only ten bucks.
>> RALPH BABUSCI: And it works with PC as well. So the benefit of the ability to be able to take notes on the fly as well as to be able to search for different items or images in your notes. So you can have different tabs that actually have different meanings that you've set up during the course of the year or different courses that you've had throughout the course of the year, and there might be an item that you want to search for and you can actually type in what item you are searching for and it looks through all of the notes that you've had to pull up words, images, documents, anything that you might have had associated with those notes.
>> CHRIS KABAT: And the other thing, and I'll stop about tablet PC's, but the other thing good about one note is that it has a record button, this is used in classrooms, so the students are writing down, annotating the power point printouts or whatever they're doing and recording whatever the teacher is saying and it's synchronized recording, so if I got to page 4 of my one lecture 4, I've got the audio for it right there.
>> RALPH BABUSCI: He actually works for Microsoft. So any other questions? Yes?
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Just ease of access, is this just with Vista and you still have to go in through the control panel with XP.
>> RALPH BABUSCI: Yes, so XP has the old wheelchair icon which we've moved away from for obvious reasons, and these are all part of windows Vista, so whether it's home, premium, ultimate, it's part of the different versions.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Does XP have the dictate?
>> RALPH BABUSCI: It had narrator as well as speech recognition. I can actually go out and put.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'll check it out.
>> CHRIS KABAT: The features in Vista work a lot better.
>> RALPH BABUSCI: Actually this screen shows some of the technologies that were there previously. They came out with it in Vista, so ‑‑ yes?
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: So is the ‑‑ do I still have as much work to train to understand my speech as I did in the old version?
>> RALPH BABUSCI: Actually we ‑‑ why don't you go through that.
>> CHRIS KABAT: This is actually Ralph's laptop and I trained it while we were sitting out there in about 5 minutes. So it takes you through a number of phrases and in about ten minutes it's trained enough to get you started and as you use it, it actually picks up on different idiosyncrasies with your voice and will adjust and adapt and become better. So just by using it, you train it even more.
>> RALPH BABUSCI: Yeah, if you haven't looked at it, it's actually really cool technology, as Chris said we spent maybe ten minutes switching from my personalized desk top, personalized items on my PC and made it available for Chris to use as if it was his own. So in a matter of three or four minutes it conformed to him, with his nuances on how he speaks. So it's actually really nice. Any other questions? Yes?
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: You were talking about one note and its recording capabilities. So is it recording ‑‑ I mean, you have to have a microphone obviously to record? Is it recording it as an audio file and saving it a resume in the media format? Is there any way to dump it out on to text, to sort of transcribe the file at all?
>> RALPH BABUSCI: That's a good question. I assume you have to do some coding to take that windows video away file and have it take that and recognize it as text. It probably has to listen through the whole thing through some form of a narrator and actually picks it up and converts it to text. So there is a way of doing it. I haven't done it, I can explore it a little further.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I was just thinking for some sort of captioning thought.
>> RALPH BABUSCI: The way it does in terms of record voice to text, it was really created to be able to again synchronize your notes with whatever speaking is going on in that course or classroom and be able to go back to your notes to refer to that at that time. But that's a great point. How do I take that and convert it to text. That's something I'll take back and ‑‑ there's actually a couple partners out in the Expo center that have the tools that are doing some of that.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: I just figured it was built into a system that nobody knew, just didn't know how to use it.
>> RALPH BABUSCI: That's a good point.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: One question that I hear a lot is that with the Microsoft, particularly in Vista, you've got the speech generator and you've got the voice recognition and then Microsoft has its own voice recognition and speak aloud. How do they differ?
>> RALPH BABUSCI: Using the same underlying technology, so anything that has ISAP capabilities, you're going to be able to use voice technology. And that should conform with Vista. So there's ways of taking existing technologies you're having whether it's ours or someone else's and be able to incorporate that.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: So the user should not worry about using it in Vista or office.
>> CHRIS KABAT: Right.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: It is the same quality of software?
>> CHRIS KABAT: Right.
Anyone else? Well, thank you. We appreciate your time. Again, we'll be here for a little while if you actually want to see some of the items that we talked about today and we can show you how to work them on your PC, if you want. So thank you.
>> AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you very much.
(Applause).
>> KEVIN PRICE: Yeah, those folks who are staying, we'll start in five minutes.
