 Good evening everyone. Welcome to another edition of Curiosity on Stage. Bienvenue à tous à cette nouvelle édition de curiosité en scène. My name is Lisa Leblanc and I'm the Director General of the Canada Science and Technology Museum. For those of you attending this evening with visual impairment, I'm a woman with long brown hair and dark frame glasses and I'm joining you this evening from my home office. Before we get started, I want to turn your attention to some of the accessibility features we have in place this evening and all of this information and the links can be found in the chat function. For English and French captions, please visit the website that is in the chat function, which will allow you to receive simultaneous translation. If you'd like to listen to simultaneous interpretation of the meeting, you also need to follow these steps. So you would download the Interactio app from the Apple Store or Google Play and then you're able to enter the event code, which is COS2021. So to listen to the translation of this event tonight, you download the Interactio mobile app, either in the Apple Store or Google Play Store, and you enter the event code, COS2021. All of these information for the translation can be accessed in the chat, which is in Zoom. Also for your information, this presentation is being recorded and will be available on our YouTube channel in the coming weeks. So if you want to share it with friends or want to see it again, it will be available shortly. I also want to take the opportunity to thank our sponsor, the National Research Council, that have provided really generous support for us for the Curiosity On Stage adaptive tech series. And their support will go to all of these services that we are providing this evening and also uploading everything on YouTube and making sure that we have transcriptions there as well once the event is complete. So a little bit about Curiosity On Stage, which is a thought leadership series here at the Science and Tech Museum that looks to promote discussion around two key questions. The first one is what is the future of innovation in science and technology, which is a really broad question, but then the other is what is its impact on society. And so what we've done is for the next three years we'll be focusing these talks on three key thematic areas. One is on artificial intelligence and there'll be some great talks coming this fall around that theme, medical innovations, which will also be focusing on this fall and really looking at the future of diabetes research. And tonight's theme, assistive tech, and we'll be looking to highlight more talks this time next year around that theme as well. Selon l'organisation mondial de la santé, plus d'un milliard de personnes dans le monde souffrent d'une forme de handicap. Rien qu'au Canada cela représente près de 6,2 millions de personnes handicapées, soit 22% de la population total. Designing for inclusivity not only opens up our products and services to more people, but it also reflects how people really are. All humans grow and adapt to the world around them, and we want our designs to reflect that. Everyone has abilities and limits to those abilities. So designing for people with permanent disabilities actually results in designs that benefit the people universally. Our presenter this evening which we're really excited to welcome is the accessibility lead from Microsoft Canada, Ricardo Wagner. Microsoft technology elevates the education, employment and living standards for billions of people around the world, especially people with disabilities. Ricardo has made it his personal mission to play a role in that transformation. Microsoft's 2019 hackathon grand prize winner awarded to the most influential accessibility advocate Microsoft worldwide for Microsoft. And he's been recognized as the 2019 Jim Platterity Award for leadership in accessibility and inclusion, and Microsoft Platinum Club in 2018. So please join me in welcoming Ricardo this evening. Thank you so much, Lisa. I'm going to just share my screen before I start on second. It is Microsoft without PowerPoint, we can't present, we can't have a meeting. So before I start, I just want to check, can you see my slide? Lisa, if you can please confirm. Okay, can you, I'm going to just make a short description, brief description about me. My name is Ricardo Wagner. I am talking from Oakville in Ontario. I'm a white middle age man. I'm wearing formal clothes. This is so interesting, like interesting to work from home, but still dress formal clothes. It's a very special event and occasion, and I'm super happy to be here representing my colleagues from Microsoft. Today, I'm going to take you through the amazing journey of accessibility and how we are working to empower persons with disabilities, but everyone in the world. Microsoft Mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. And we are super happy to be here to share some innovation, share some learnings and insights throughout this journey. I just want to make sure that you can see the screen if captions are working. So I can't see right now the chat. So, Brian or Lisa, and if you don't mind to unmute yourself and just tell me if everything is fine from my end. It looks good, Ricardo. Thank you so much. Thank you. Good. So I want to start the session by sharing a story, a story from a person with sight loss that shared an email to Microsoft a few months ago, sharing an experience that happened in her life. She was living with her mother and her mother passed away. And as a person with sight loss, it was a bit challenging for her to adapt to the new world without her mother to help and support in daily activities at home. She then installed an app called seeing I seeing I is an app designed and built by engineers inside Microsoft, and this app helps people with sight loss and blind to navigate the world. With this app, you can point your phone using the camera and the phone will start to give descriptions of the objectives. If you point the phone and the camera to a person, this is going to describe the person if the person is happy if the person is sad. You can also point to a paper and if it's something handwriting or if you have letters, you can have a description so the phone can actually take a picture and start read it aloud to you. This is an example of the artificial intelligence cognitive services that is available today, which detects services with images and helps people, especially people with sight loss and blind to better navigate the world. And the subject of the meal that she shared with us was, this is the greatest time in human history to be blind. This is the greatest time in human history to be blind. And the story that she described, she said that she decided to clean her mother's bedroom, and she start to open some boxes with pictures and letters, and she was using seeing I app to describe the image to read the content. And she found a letter that her mother wrote to her before passing away. Through the technology had a chance to connect with her mother again. And it just bring to us a perspective of possibilities that we can all achieve when we bring technology when we manage to address mismatches by creating bridges with technology. In this example, artificial intelligence empowering a person with sight loss. Okay, I, I'm going to bring three topics that I want to cover. And I would love to invite you all for questions for, if you like, for example, or if you have a comment. Please use the chat and make a question. And by the end of the session, I promise to come back and select some some questions and get back to you but let's make this session interactive. So first talk about disabilities. And then I'm going to cover the topic of human centric design going a little bit further in inclusive design. And then, of course, this is the future of accessibility we're going to talk about the future. We're going to talk about tech trends in what is going on in the tech industry that we should all expect in the coming future. And many things by the way I'm going to share are already available but unfortunately not many people are aware because innovation goes so fast, but we're going to make it work. So the very first thing that I want to invite you for this conversation is the definition of a person with disability. The word health organization, the definition for persons with disabilities is a personal, it's not a personal health condition is a mismatch human interaction environments and tools are disabled, not people. So if you think from the environment from tools from from a perspective of a of an object or not a person, you, you start to think about this. This idea more from a solvable design challenge. And if you make it right, you end up creating or you end up innovating, right. I stairs make the building inaccessible, not the wheelchair. When you start to point your attention to the environment to the tools and not the person you start to realize that this is a beautiful opportunity for us to design solutions, products, building software. Think about anything that you want to build. If you build this accessible by design, if you build a solution that works for everyone. You end up unlocking an opportunity to include people who are about to be excluded, but you also enhance experience and create an environment where more people can benefit from what you created. And there are so many perspectives we can take from this point of view. One is, first is from a market opportunity. So if we have business leaders listening to this conversation. One E five people in Canada has a disability. So if you don't design solutions for persons with disabilities, or if you don't design solutions to include everyone. I love the code from TD bank bird Floyd from the assistive tech lab. It says, if you don't design for accessibility, it's like saying to every fifth person who walks in your door. I don't really want your business. We just can't do this right. And there are 1.3 billion people with disabilities around the world. 1.3 billion people. 6.4 million people in Canada, and the number is growing by the way. Sorry, I said 6.4 is actually 8.2 million. The number has has recently changed. Imagine, as the population is aging, 50% of the population above 60 years old will develop one or more disabilities. Also, 70% of disabilities are invisible. You don't know if a person has a learning disability, a mental health condition, a site loss, hearing loss, 70% of disabilities are invisible. An employment rate even before COVID was two times higher compared to persons without disabilities. And we know that COVID and the pandemic has impacted the community of persons with disabilities dramatically. So, and the point is, only one out of 10 people with disabilities have access to assistive technology. And this just gives us a sense of the work that we all need to do to ensure we include a huge population that is not actively participating in our society because the way we design our society, we exclude those people by design. And that's the invitation for us to think on what we can do. And this topic is fascinating because I don't know, I don't know how, but we kind of learn a way of thinking how human beings are. Maybe you heard someone saying, how is the person, you met that person, how this person looked like. Oh, it's a normal person. Or it's an average person. It's not such a thing like average or normal people. It doesn't exist. We are all unique, even from all perspectives from the time we're born to the time we get older, we change over time. We are all unique. We all have abilities. And sometimes we need, we require ways to adapt to the environment that we are in. If I, for example, if I go to another place, and I don't speak the language that people speak there, the environment is going to be disabled for me, and I may require support to communicate. And that's the piece that it's, it's fascinating from this topic because when you design solutions for people with permanent disabilities, it end up empowering persons with permanent disabilities, but also people with temporary disability or even situational. Let me give an example. If you design a solution for a person without an arm, this is going to work for a person who broke an arm, or a person holding a baby, or a laptop, or a team Horton's double double accessibility experience is the same. So the mentality of designing for the average for the normal is outdated. It was an idea that I got traction during the industry revolution. But as we are today in the digital era, in the digital era, you can and you must design solutions for the extreme. I know it's going to be a little bit hard for you to think, but I'm going to invite you to think of a dinosaur sleeping. I know it's, I know it's late, but just, just, just follow me. Imagine a dinosaur is sleeping the long tail and the head and the floor. If you ask a business leader and say, where should I go, where I'm going to have like more potential for our market. I say, oh, that's the back of the dinosaur. Go to the average. Where are you going to find the majority? So what about the tail and the head? Oh, never mind. This is a niche market. This is what we're going to look after. Let's first explore where we can capture or we assist most of the people. Another one we go to this, to this segment or niche market. This mindset, as you can notice is exclusion is a decision making process. The way that you are choosing and decided to include some you are also decided to exclude many. So when we visit the Microsoft lab in Redmond, there is a note on the wall saying, if you don't intentionally include, you unintentionally exclude. And that's the problem because in many situations, people exclude without knowing. That's why we approach inclusive design. And I'm not sure if you were introduced to this topic, but this topic is fascinating. So inclusive design, and I love the definition from Berkeley University, Susan, she says inclusive design doesn't mean you are designing one thing for all people. You are designing a diversity of things so everyone finds a way to participate. So in the inclusive design principle, it's quite simple. There are three principles to follow. And if you follow, you are likely to design and create solutions that are inclusive for everyone. The first one is recognized exclusion. Humans, we all have unconscious bias, we all have perspectives that are unique. And we tend to analyze and see the world based on our own experiences, expectations and perspective. Of course, the world is big, right? There are so many nationalities, languages, religion, abilities. Some people live in the tropical side, some people live in the cold side of the world, right. From different perspectives, we tend to create or innovate by approaching solutions that we think it's going to work for many people. But if you don't ask yourself to think, the solution I'm building right now, a website, a net, a product, just think who is not going to be able to experience what I'm creating. You're going to be excluded from my experience. By making this question, you invite you and your team to think the people who are excluded, and you're going to identify a lot. And likely, if you discuss this topic from an ability point of view, you are likely to discover that many people with disabilities will be excluded from the design, from the idea, from the ideation. Then we invite teams, creators, to move to the second principle of inclusive design, which is learn from diversity. The best way to address this mismatch is to invite people with disabilities to be part of the design process. We call this nothing about us without us. Instead of people without disabilities pretending that they know what's going on and thinking that, yeah, this solution may not work for a person with sight loss. Let me just do an exercise and do a blindfold and try, don't do that. Invite a person with sight loss to be part of the design process. You'll learn a lot. You'll learn from different perspectives and ways that you can perform or address the mismatches from your product. And if you make it work, and you will, because there are so many possibilities that you can achieve, you go to the third principle of inclusive design, which is so for one, extend too many. Once you make it work for the example of the dinosaur sleeping. If you make it work for the tail or the head, this is going to work for everyone. So think of a solution that if you make it work for the extreme, it end up helping everyone else. And that's the concept of inclusive design is a is a concept that that helps you design solutions that include people who were excluded before but benefits everyone else in different experiences. You probably heard the example of the curb cut. So the curb cut was designed to empower and help people using wheelchair to commute independently in cities. And guess what, the curb cut is also empowering parents with strollers teenagers with skates or skateboard or bicycle. It helps everyone. And that's the concept of when you design a solution that includes the extreme, it end up creating more scenarios more perspectives, more experiences. Everybody benefits from the same solution that was created and designed for the extreme. That's the simple magic. So the idea ends up to be something that you drive inclusion. You create products and ideas that include people, but you also unlock so many perspectives. At Microsoft, we recently launched the Xbox adaptive controller. There are so many interesting stories from from Xbox adaptive controller. We learn that many gamers they were unable to play because the Xbox controller was not accessible. It was not designed for persons with with disabilities dexterity or a person just with one arm. And the team came together to design a solution with and for gamers with disabilities. And recently we launched the next box adaptive controller, which was a very interesting experience and I'm going to play a video, a video that we played during the Super Bowl in 2019. Just to give the sense of the experience we went through by designing a solution to include gamers with disabilities. But there was a question the day that we decide to ship the product. We said, okay, people are going to buy how people are going to unpack the box. And it was a question mark. That day, and I have an Xbox adaptive controller with me that day, the teams sit together again with gamers, and we start to debate ways that we could make the package accessible. What we learned, especially with people with mobility impairments, they tend to use their month teeth to open boxes packages. And the idea was, how can we create a package that people don't need to use their teeth. And it was a very simple solution. Just pulling the box, you end up opening the entire box with all the components. So the innovation was not just with the Xbox adaptive controller, the product, but also the package. Today, we use the same package or format of package for all other products we ship. So just by showing that the innovation sometimes we're thinking very sophisticated things, but the innovation can also come in simple ways like a package. You probably had the experience of unpacking a tech product, and I'm not going to blame competitors because Microsoft, we did the same. But it's beautiful from a package, but so hard to open, right? So by doing this with and for persons with disabilities, we learn how to make a solution that benefits everyone. And as I said, we had a Superbowl ad, and I'm going to play the video right now for you. My name is Grover. Sean, my name is Ian. I'm Taylor. My name is Owen, and I am nine and a half years old. So Owen was born with a rare genetic disorder called Escobar syndrome. He's had 33 surgeries to date. I love video games, my friends, my family, and again, video games. It's his way of interacting with his friends when he can't physically otherwise do it. What I like about the adaptive controller is now everyone can play. You can just say, all right, that's that button, that's that button, that's that button. Perfect. One of the biggest fears, early on, is how well alone do you think about the other kids? He's not different when he plays. No matter how your body is or how fast you are, you can play. It's a really good thing to have in this world. My name is... Everybody plays with Owen. And the concept of designing solutions or adapting the environment to people, it's not a new concept. It actually, there are many studies in books about this topic. One of my favorite is a book called The End of Average from Todd Rose. He shares an example from the US Army. In 1946, they could not explain why airplanes were crashing. And in one day, one single day, 17 pilots died in accidents that they could not explain if it was a human error or if it was something related to the aircraft. So there was an investigation in place to understand what happened. And they invited many experts. And they suspect that the cockpit was not the right size of the cockpit for the soldiers and for the pilots that were experiencing the aircraft at that time. So aircrafts, unfortunately for war, it was invented by 1918 and 22. And the cockpit was designed during that time. People were just flying with cockpits that were designed in the beginning of the century. And then they suspect to say, hey, maybe the soldiers and the pilots, they increased the size and would be better for us to measure pilots again. So they invited 4,000 pilots and they measure everything, the size of their fingers, the hand, the arm, head, everything. And they got to an ideal cockpit. They did one more thing. They set 10 different tasks that every single pilot should perform when they were inside the cockpit. So 4,000, it was 4,063 pilots, with all pilots that they had in this research. Do you know how many pilots were able to perform all the 10 tasks that they put for this test? 10. There were 10 that every single pilot should perform. Zero. No one, no one could perform the 10 different tasks inside the cockpit. So with that insight, they learned that instead of creating an ideal cockpit, they should create a cockpit that should adapt to the person. So that's why today when you go inside your car and you adjust the seat or the steering wheel, it was all the insight that came from the study, which is people is different, so you need to adapt. So all the adjustments that you have, for example, for a helmet or clothes, equipment, it all came from this idea that there is no average. Every single human being is unique, is different, right? So I hope by now with the example of the dinosaur, which is one of these slides I'm sharing right now, which is not a dinosaur, but it's a chart showing that innovation is at the edge, at the extreme. When you design and make solutions for the extreme, you end up creating solutions for everyone. Or in the way that I like to say accessibility for few becomes usability for many. We all benefit from an inclusive experience that is designed for an inclusive experience. I hope by now this is a concept that you have in mind. At Microsoft, our mission is to empower every person in every organization on the planet to achieve more. Say every person, it does include persons with disabilities. We are right now in an era of tech intensity, as we are calling here at Microsoft. So everything is digital and there are so many cloud computing and technology for us to explore, to create. And this is a very interesting moment in time that we are leaving that we can all benefit from the digital revolution. And at Microsoft, we have four principles to bring all this technology to life. The first is to ensure that technology is inclusive, ensure that it's trusted, that we respect human rights. And we also make it sustainable. These are the four things at the core. Every time we create, we bring a solution to life. And one of the codes from our CEO Sacha Nadella, and I love this code, it says technology is the only malleable thing humans have created and we can create economic prosperity. And this is so true. Artificial intelligence and all the capabilities we have today, we can create and innovate, bring solutions that we solve problems that we were not thinking it would be possible. And of course, for us to bring this to life, we need to have some perspective. One of the questions we make inside Microsoft is not asking what computers can do, but asking what computers should do. This is so important because as we design codes, as we bring data to these codes, we need to ensure that to ask ourselves is this solution that we are creating now, is it going to exclude or include people? Is it going to create privilege for a certain group? Or exclude other people in terms of privileges? Is it going to be reliable, safety? What about privacy and security? How can we ensure that external agents, government, anyone else can come back to the algorithm and the system we created to understand if something happened to make people accountable, to be transparent. These are ethical questions that we all need to make with the technology we have today. It is the perspective that all technology can be a tool or a weapon, but the issue around accessibility and digital inclusion is in many occasions people end up excluding without knowing. As you have probably noticed, I am presenting using captions. So this is one of the examples of how artificial intelligence is empowering speakers to do presentations that are more inclusive. This technology was designed to empower people hard of hearing to join conference calls like we are here right now. But once we made it work, it is also empowering not just people hard of hearing, but also foreign language speakers. I could join this presentation speaking Portuguese, my native language. I could pick and choose up to 72 different languages and you could follow this presentation in a very inclusive way. So this is a built-in technology that is available by design. So if you have PowerPoint today, just turn on captions when you present, you are going to make the presentation inclusive for people hard of hearing, for foreign language speakers or someone attending your session in a noisy environment. And we have been including more and more languages as part of the Microsoft Translator Services. And we are so happy to see the evolution and we are now adding first-nation languages. We were so happy to share recently the announcement of the first Canadian, first-nation language that is part of the services. So imagine that the way we are training, we hope that we can capture and store all the different languages across the globe. So in the future, we can preserve and future generations can understand meaning, stories and connect with their own and preferred language. So this is one of the examples of the evolution that is taking place. And we are so happy to see this happening. The other solution is there is a technology embedded in PowerPoint called rehearsal. So just imagine you have an important presentation. And you want to train the session. So when you do rehearsal, artificial intelligence will tell how fast you speak. It will tell, for example, that you are using a lot of the transition slides telling of what to say this. Sensitive words. For example, you open a session and say, hey, how are you guys? It is going to say don't say you guys. right? It will give you suggestions of other words for you to say. And it will also analyze your body language. It can capture the camera and tell you how you're behaving from the camera. And at the end, you get a report telling you how many slides you covered, how much time you spent in each slide, your pace, your pitch, fillers, something that you said that was not appropriate, so it can help you to be a better speaker. This is artificial intelligence, empowering everyone. Imagine someone anxious for a presentation. This person can do many dry run sessions, leveraging using artificial intelligence to do great. So recently, we launched new services for artificial intelligence. The study of Earth's landforms is called bicycle geography. Landforms. The study of Earth's landforms is called bicycle geography. Landforms can be mountains and valleys. So this is like the point that we want to bring, which is showing how artificial intelligence is addressing mismatching and empowering everyone, especially persons with disabilities. So by seeing what artificial intelligence can do, we can understand the potential of this topic. So by now, I hope, as a final message, that you, like me, see this topic as a very strategic topic. Disability is a strength, and we should welcome persons with disabilities in the workforce, in the classroom, everywhere. It is also an engine of innovation when we design solutions that include everyone we innovate. And technology empowers everyone, especially persons with disabilities. I hope you can also enjoy and start your journey as well, become an innovator in accessibility. And I look forward to hearing your questions. And I'm going to please now welcome you for Q&A. If you want to learn more, I'm sharing some links, Microsoft.com slash accessibility, and also my LinkedIn profile for additional questions. Thank you. Merci. Thank you, Ricardo. I'm going to invite everyone to take some time and to use the Q&A function in the bottom of your tab. And if you have some questions, please post them in there. Ricardo, we had an audio issue when you played the last video. And if you'd like to take a minute, maybe to just go over some of the features that you were talking about. I am so sorry for that. So I know a few people commented. So I just thought while we wait for the Q&A, maybe you could go through that. Easy. So in the video, I show an example of an accessibility tool built team in Microsoft Teams that we use for education. It's called reading process. So teachers can assign books for students to read. And when the teacher assigns a book, kids can read inside the tool. And artificial intelligence can understand the accuracy of the speech, the velocity, miss spelled words. And each student receives a personal report. And teacher can also have a view from the main dashboard, the performance of the entire class. And if the teacher noticed something that was not delivered well or a point to explore, the teacher can go targeted to a specific word or specific topic. So it's just showing how artificial intelligence is not just addressing mismatches, but it's also empowering every single student. It was recently launched. Reading process. Thank you. That is so fascinating. And I love the way that it helps kind of guide kids through it. So in a way that isn't reading out loud, let's say in front of the class or giving them sort of the empowerment themselves to go through it in a one-on-one basis. That sounds really great. So there's quite a few questions that have come in. And so I had a few of my own, but I will hold off on mine so that we can go through the ones here. And the first one is around the Xbox controller and redesigning of the box. Was it simple fixes or did the packaging have to be completely redesigned from what it was originally going to be? That's a very good question. So we did this by design from the very beginning. One of the concepts of accessibility is do accessibility from the very first start, not as an end point. So accessibility is not a cosmetic. So the good thing, the team decided to build the package from the beginning. So we made it right from the beginning. So in this example, it was built from the beginning. We had other examples that didn't work well, as you can guess, of products and solutions that we tried to include accessibility after the launch. It didn't work. So we learned throughout the experience. So everything we do is accessibility by design. And this was applied to this special adaptive controller, but I can speak from experience that we recently bought an Xbox for our house earlier this year. And it was a delight opening the box. And so has Microsoft sort of now applied that across all of their products, regardless of whether they're considered adaptive or not. Exactly. Lisa, you got the point. It's designed for and with persons with disabilities, but we all benefit. We all benefit. It's just easier. Like this weekend, I was cooking and I did spaghetti with a special sauce. It was impossible to open the thing and get the tomato. I was like, how can they build something that is so hard? I don't have this ability, the extent of it to open, but I almost ask help. So it's example that we can do better to create packages that are more accessible. And by doing this, everybody can benefit. Well, yes, as a parent, I think I can say we've probably all suffered opening up child's packaging and gifts on either Christmas morning or birthdays that are impossible. So we certainly appreciate it. There's one here from Christina, who's our CEO here at Ingenium, and she's asking what are some of the common mistakes that organizations make when they begin their journey to provide more accessible services or products and buildings? They assume they know what's going on. They don't invite persons with disabilities to be part of the design. They don't invite people with disabilities to be part of the decision making. That's the very common mistake. So if I could land a message is welcome, appreciate diversity, welcome persons with disabilities to be part of all decisions. It's like ensure that they are at the table, not at the menu. They are the ones who really understand the mismatches and can bring valuable insights that can be, in many occasions, simple, very simple things that people can do and that will change, that will make it work. Recently, I was working with a new colleague who was hired. He has a lot. He has sight loss. And we were debating like what should be the best way? He said just check accessibility of the content and share the presentation in advance. Don't worry. It will be fine for me if you present and show your slides during the meeting, but just to ensure that I receive the content in advance so I can consume the content in the screen reader. And then I go to your meeting. I am prepared. It doesn't, right? Yeah. And so, you know, you showed us some of the Microsoft Office innovations here and there's a question that talks about we know that 365 has so many of these great options to improve accessibility and to give you those tools. Are there other innovations that are being worked on right now that you could give us a little insight on or a little sneak peek or that you're excited about? Yes. The piece that I'm super, super, super excited is around the most common disability. Are you inviting the chat here? What is the most common disability worldwide? Blindness, hearing loss, mobility, mental health, mental health is the number one. So there are lots of things going on right now to help improve mental health and well-being. And there are many researchers now thinking of the fatigue of technology, like things that we all experienced during the pandemic as an example. So there are lots of things that technology can help us to avoid spending more time with tech, which is weird, but it is super important on how can we connect in a meaningful way, use tech as necessary, and not, you know, end up in situations that we're going to keep checking our email inbox or teams or messaging or all the things all the time. So I feel that there are lots of things that we are learning and I believe that we're going to see many things in the future that will help us to better connect and relate to each other using technology. This is a few tricks for. The other one I would say health. I heard you said sessions around health. Lots of things going on in health. And like you said, there's physical health, there's mental health and all of it being certainly quite prevalent in our horizon at the moment, because we've been living through this absolutely mad year of the pandemic. It seems like it's heightened our ability to put these things forward and to talk about them. There's a question here. I think that relates a little bit to this. If I'm understanding the question. So they're asking, can you discuss how Microsoft is addressing the current bias that is duplicated in our society's value systems? And I think there is some stuff there around mental health. Maybe I'm misinterpreting the question, but are there other things that you're conscious about, whether it be, you know, social standing or economic health and all of those things. What are some of the things that concern you over at Microsoft? So it is a very, very, very good question. I will get to this question. I'm going to just make a bridge from what you mentioned before about the pandemic. The pandemic is a great example. The environment became disabled. And we were first forced to accommodate ourselves in our home. So we went through an accommodation experience. We thought it was temporary. So some people like me, I did some MacGyver things at home to make it work. And it didn't work. So I ended up adapting my environment. So that's the invitation is. It's not about accommodation. It's about adaptation. How we adapt the environment that we all get a sense of belonging. That's a very important perspective in the pandemic. Help us to. Notice the experience that many people with disabilities, they experience daily. Back to the question of bias. I think we have a lot of work to do. We have a lot of training. We have a lot of training. We have a lot of ongoing initiative inside of Microsoft with lots of trainings. Inviting and appreciating perspectives. Activating talent acquisition for inclusive hiring. And hiring diverse perspectives to help us. To. As I mentioned, recognizing exclusion. We are recognizing many exclusions that we have in ways that we deal with partners with suppliers. And we are constantly looking to. Increase the representation of the population we serve. So as we are here as a mission to empower every person in every organization on the planet to achieve more. To better reflect the population we serve. We need to have Dan as part of our organization. We have more than 150,000 employees in. I guess a hundred. More than a hundred countries. And this is, this is super interesting because we can. Share perspectives quickly with colleagues from. Very different places remote from different. Culture. So one of the things that we do is to really bring perspectives. Ask people. It's, I think the bias is. Be comfortable to ask. Don't assume ask. So we, I just had an example. We had a project that we were working with a team that we need to assist and support customers with psych loss. We invite people with psych loss. What do you think? And they gave the perspective. So it not only made us comfortable, but we ensured that what we were doing was right. So appreciate diverse and welcome different. Perspective to the fabric. And ask simply ask. And I think I'd add on our small scale at the museum, we did some consultations after we reopened the museum in 2017. We did a little bit while we were in development, but we realized our mistakes. And so I think that fear sometimes of even trying to. Take a step forward to change the way that you work or. The environment that you're offering or the products that you're developing. Makes you reticent to even start on that path. And I think, you know, for us, the learning has been, okay, we made mistakes. So let's fix it. And let's figure out what the path forward is. And I don't think that there's anything lost in that. I think it just gives us that sense of confidence then moving forward and saying, okay, let's try something else. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's one, I think you mentioned 150,000 employees across the globe. And so someone here is asking about. When what background are you looking for when building your accessible team? So you talked a bit about that representation and diversity and asking, but what kind of skill set is there? There are they, there's certainly not all computer engineers. So what is the environment that renders the, the mix of, of disciplines and expertise and interests that, that create that magic at Microsoft. We look for abilities. So we look for skills. That's, that's the very first thing we look for abilities and skills as humans. We all have certain abilities. And sometimes we can call weakness or points that. If you connect a person who doesn't do well, certain tasks, you should not do this job. Right. So we look for talents. We look for, for expertise. We look for skills. That's the first thing. It is not just technical skills, but it's also human skills put in this way. So we look for humans who knows how to talk to humans. Right. I know it, it's sometimes weird to say this, but there are many examples and training that we go inside our own organization of situations, ethical situations that we need to discuss. And we expect people to behave from a human point of view, bringing their heart. Say, this is the right thing to do. Right. And especially now with artificial intelligence and coding, that you can bring emotion. You can bring cognitive perspectives and services. This is so crucial and important for us to make it right. From the start. Right. But in high demand, tax cues around coding, developers, people with knowledge in AI, machine learning, natural language processes. But I'm not limited to because it's a big organization. We are also looking for people with HR skills, marketing skills, sales skills. Right. I think it's a combination of soft and hard skills, but in high demand, computing engineers, tech things is, is we have like lots of open positions inside Microsoft in our ecosystem as well. And so we talked about this while we were waiting for the webinar to start tonight. So someone's asking about watching the new feature in teams in a classroom. How can we ensure that it doesn't discriminate reading skills based on pronunciation of kids with accents or with speech difficulties? And you talked a little bit about that if you're on lived experience. Yes. Yes. It is a very, very, very, very interesting question. One of the things that fascinates me is people take to work with computers and interact with computers like they used to interact with typewriters. No, it's my generation. I did a course for typewriter. Maybe we have millennials here that you have no idea what I'm talking about. But at that time it was a skill. If you had a diploma in showing how many words you could type per minute, it would be skew. But with computers today, you can use your finger. You can touch. You can use inking. You can use your voice. You can use your eyes. So the magic is to connect abilities to the environment, to tools. And we have by design in Windows 10 and Office 365 all the possible ways for you to interact either using your voice, your eyes, touch, inking as a tablet, as a notebook with keyboard, USB for assistive technology. Remember the example of the pilot in the aircraft. It's not people adapting to the laptop or Windows 10 and Office 365. It's the computer and the technology adapting to you. So back to this example. Yes, there are other ways. And the teacher will know that the student is a foreign language speaker. Guess what? Set up in the preferred first language. And if the kid wants to perform that specific class with the preferred language, feel free to switch your language. And I was going to share the report in the same way. So you can make the most important point is to educate children on how to read, how to call, how to read, how to read. That's the key goal. It's not to get to the perfection of, yeah, it was the highest quality. It's like going deep in the objective of helping kids to learn to study, right? There are some very interesting developments around people don't call any more known verbal. They call alternative communication. Many ways that you can, detect with facial expression or advances around sign language interpretation. So this field is fascinating, but a very good question. And what we do is we apply other possible languages. Teachers can give more time. Putting this way, teachers can give on their own terms, the specific and design session for each student. And get the best education possible. So it really does become individualized learning that suits the person rather than the person trying to suit the learning. And just thinking like in the past, a kid with learning disabilities, for example, kids were invited to find special education. Like dyslexia is a common example. And today with the right software, kids can get the best education possible. And today with the right software, kids can participate and join classrooms like everyone else. So the problem is the school, the technology, not the children, right? So by adapting the school, we ended up creating inclusive experiences. And Lisa, I see also a question from a colleague of mine, Pedro Bozicchia. He's in Seattle right now. He shared what has been the impact of the pandemic to people with disabilities and how technology can help. Very good question. One of the things we learned from the very beginning was mental health. We all got to a point of a stressful situation, fatigue, people joining calls after calls, working after hours, people in different time zones with remote learning, kids, couples fighting all the time. Everybody experienced this, right? Or most of people. So when we got to this point, many customers reached out to us, asked, hey, Microsoft, you've been working remote in hybrid environment for a long time, right? What are some best practices and things you can do? And when we were discussing this internally at Microsoft to give some guidance and reference to customers, it was a fascinating conversation with the community of persons with disabilities that jumped and said, yeah, you are all experienced something that I've been experienced for a long time since I had my accent. So in one of the stories I heard, the person said the problem was not just the car accident that I became quadriplegic, but was my mental health and my understanding of my new way of living, understanding that it would be challenge for me to go outside, to commute independently. And I need to manage my way to make my home, my workplace, my way to interact with my friends. And yeah, it was tough, but I made it work. So one of the learnings was the community of people with permanent disabilities, they ended up helping many more people because they went through this experience before and they could give ideas for all of us to think on how we could go through the situation with examples like taking care of what we were eating, drinking, sleep time, dressing ourselves with our preferred clothes, not assuming that just because you are at home, you are going to wear pyjamas. It's tricky, but I'll give an example for you now. I am at my home right now, but I decided to dress myself with clothes that I pretend that I am just imagining that I am in this stage and you are in front of me. This is important because by doing this, you did not just trick your mind, but you're connecting a meaningful way as well. So thank you for the question. We've all learned adaptation whether we realized it or not this year. I was speaking to a colleague today and we were saying we look forward to the day where we don't have to always pre-plan to do something. Whether it's to say, is that place open? What are the requirements? What do I need to do? And I think the people with disabilities do this all the time. And so we've had this little glimpse at sort of the daily adaptation that occurs for anyone who might be in a wheelchair or has vision loss that need to do the pre-planning. And so I guess there's a kind of a deep learning that we've had that maybe we should talk about a little bit more, which could be a whole other evening. So we are over time, Ricardo. I know there's more questions. So here is what I'm going to say. First of all, thank you. Thank you for your insights, your generosity, your time, your enthusiasm, your passion. It has been a great talk. I've seen you speak before. You never disappoint. Thank you very much for sharing what's going on at Microsoft. Ricardo has agreed that he will look at the questions with us and we will try to post something for all the outstanding questions. So that if you've asked a question and feel like you're getting a little bit let down because we're running out of time, we're going to send out something that will at least respond to those questions in the coming weeks. If you have loved this presentation and would love to see it again or share it, we had someone in the chat asking about sharing it with their class, sharing it with colleagues, sharing it as part of awareness building in your own organizations or in your circle. We're going to have this. We've been recording it. We're going to have it on our YouTube channel in the coming weeks and we are trying to commit as best we can to be fully accessible. So we're going to make sure that we've got transcriptions and translations and captioning and everything that's required there. And if there's anything you need, please tell us and we would love to see how we can provide greater access. The other thing I'd like to say is the chat is going to have a link to a survey. The museum really love to know what you thought of tonight's talk. We want to continue this series next, this time next year, we will be welcoming some new speakers around this topic. So we'd love to make sure that the next sessions meet your interests. So if you could take the link to that survey and you will also probably receive an email from us through your registration that we will also send a survey to you through our email after tonight. And stay tuned in the fall. In the fall, we're looking again to talk about the future of diabetes. We're looking to talk about AI. And I know there's a question in here about autonomous vehicles and we are looking to bring in somebody from Blackberry Q and X to talk about their technology and all of the advancements around autonomous everything. And so hopefully you'll be able to join us for that. And if you'd love to know more, just write to our info line at ingenium.org and we can add you to the list and keep you posted on new series for Curiosity on Stage. So thank you Ricardo. Thank you everybody tonight for taking the time to join us. And then we'll have a follow-up with all of you who are in the session with us tonight for the next exciting and exciting nights and to answer your questions that have not been answered. So thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you.