Unlocking the Potential of Tech Accessibility and Diversity with Ioana Tanase

Mark Smith: 0:33
Welcome to the Power 365 show. We're an interview staff at Microsoft across the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Technology Stack. I hope you'll find this podcast educational and inspire you to do more with this great technology. Now let's get on with the show. In this episode, we're going to be talking about Microsoft accessibility toolkit, as well as accessibility in general when designing and creating software. Today's guest is from France. She works at Microsoft as an accessibility PM. She's a shoemaker and an author. You can find links to her bio and all her social media, etc. In the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Iona.

Ioana Tanase: 1:15
Hi folks and hi Mark, so happy to be here.

Mark Smith: 1:18
Thank you for coming on the show. This has come about because I saw a post you did on LinkedIn, maybe two or three months ago now, around the Microsoft accessibility toolkit. I was like you know what it's important that our community knows about, because we work with software all the time and building solutions on the Microsoft Power Platform. What do we need to know about accessibility? What should we thinking about so that we can do better when we create software? But before we get underway with that, tell us a bit about food, family and fun. What do you do when you're not working?

Ioana Tanase: 1:54
That's a true question I didn't expect. I was really too much into this whole case study for accessibility. And you're from me off. Food, family and fun. So you mentioned I'm based in France. It's a new thing. My partner and I moved here in March. I'm not originally from France, so fun right now is sort of modeling a French house or old farmhouse and trying to bring it up to scratch, as well as the one hectare of land we have that are used for growing vegetables and fruit. So that's fun. I guess that's food as well, and that includes family. So there you go.

Mark Smith: 2:37
Wow, this is so interesting. I also have about a hectare of land and I am growing vegetables and a food forest. In fact, I'm getting into what's called a synthropic forestry, which is where you plant fruit trees with normal native trees yeah, very at very strata level, so everybody gets the sun if you like, depending on how high they grow as trees, but it means that you can get a high density of fruit vegetable plants in a smaller area because they all work in like a symphony together.

Ioana Tanase: 3:17
Oh, Mark, we have to speak afterwards. I'm really interested in learning more, so you'll have to share some links. Yes, yes for real.

Mark Smith: 3:26
Tell me, like you said, you're just moved to France. Where did you originate from?

Ioana Tanase: 3:30
Yeah, so I'm born and raised in Romania and I started in Microsoft Romania almost 13 years ago. I was first out of college and I was actually doing recruitment, so didn't know much but was very much a sponge for everything that I was learning. And then six years ago I had this call it life crisis, call it pivot, call it whatever you want to call it, and I shared with my manager at the time that I wanted to have international experience. A lot of my work was being done in the UK. So I asked them hey, would you folks be willing to move me to the UK? And, surprisingly to me, they said yes. So I moved to Microsoft in the UK and then this year we had another pivot because of wanting to have a different lifestyle and move to France. So I've been incredibly privileged and fortunate to have the support from folks around me in my management to kind of move in my career. So yeah, third country with Microsoft. I'm hoping it stays here for a while. That's enough movement.

Mark Smith: 4:40
That's the thing when planting plants and trees right. It need to be around long enough to harvest, and a lot of particularly nut trees are seven years before they start producing, so it can be a while to get things established. Tell me about shoemaking and authoring.

Ioana Tanase: 4:59
Well, shoemaking came to be from a passion of buying shoes. To be perfectly honest, I've always had a thing for shoes. This is a real story, but my mom was telling me that my first word hasn't been mom or dad. I was pointing at a pair of red shoes and I said boots, or the version in Romanian for boots. So somewhere in my DNA there was a passion for it and fast forward. I did a design course, but I was always curious of. Designing is one, but making is a whole different thing. So I've always been interested in how to make them, and that's how I met my husband. Actually, he's a full-time shoemaker and during COVID he said well, it's time for you to start. So he taught me how to make shoes and I've been making them as a result and it's been an incredibly fun journey, One that had a few accidents as well with nails and hammers, but fun nevertheless. And books I've always had this on my back at least. I always knew that I wanted to publish a book, and growing up as a kid in Romania in the 90s we didn't have much entertainment, so books were kind of my privilege to the fantasy world and I loved reading and, as a result, I always knew that I wanted something that had my name on it. I don't know if it's vanity or ego or whatever it is, but it was definitely there. So that's how I decided to publish my first book. It was always there, it was always something on the list, but I'm working on something else right now which I can't share much about it, but it hopefully will come next year.

Mark Smith: 6:40
Nice, nice. It's so much work writing a book. You know it's not. You know you say, was it vanity or what it's? Whatever it takes, it's a lot of effort to write a book to get published. So I understand why you'd want to do it. I've been on that journey with my wife. She's published a book and we were in Dubrovnik at the time when she started writing Wow, and yeah, we were traveling in Europe and yeah, she was able to get her book published and it was just she wanted to. You know her life story. She wanted to get her first book out of the way, because she knows she's got other books in her and she just needed to get the one done. So that's a very cool experience, very cool experience.

Ioana Tanase: 7:25
Why is her book title? I'm writing it down.

Mark Smith: 7:28
Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Hang on a second, putting you on the spot, mark you are. It was 2017 when that happened. This is so bad I cannot remember. I'll have to come back to you on it, please do. Lost Heart Found that's what it was called. Lost Heart Found by Meg Smith. Yeah, perfect. Yeah, it's available on Amazon and stuff. Anyhow, that aside, tell me about Microsoft Accessibility. What's your role in Microsoft, what's involved in it and why is this such an important topic?

Ioana Tanase: 8:04
Yeah, so I'll start with the role and I'll share why it's an important topic for me and why it's an important topic in general. I'm part of the Accessibility Innovation Team, so our team looks at internal innovation as well as external innovation and wanting to really help organizations focus on accessibility as a catalyst and specifically, we have a grant program which is called AI for Accessibility, in which provide grants for profits and nonprofits really looking to accelerate their accessibility innovation journey, and I work with those companies on a daily basis as they're part of our program, which is 12 months. So that's what I do. Now, why is accessibility important? I mentioned that. I'm going to share why it's important for me and why for Microsoft. Personally, it's important because I am a person with disability. I'm dyslexic. I didn't know I was dyslexic until I was 32. Wow, yeah, I had no idea. I didn't even know what dyslexia was. Nobody talked about it when I was in school or in part of early life formation. And my husband actually is dyslexic and he was observing me with numbers and letters and he said did you ever take a dyslexia screen? And as a result, I did and lo and behold, I'm dyslexic and I started in this journey of kind of exploring, like, let me learn more about disability in general, not just dyslexia, and I realized that most of us, you know, either have a disability or will have a disability during our lifetime. And accessibility just feels like you know, future proofing at the bare list, but really providing everybody with a more equal platform of being what they can be in achieving, because oftentimes people with disabilities have barriers, not because of their disability, but because of the barriers that exist in society or in technology. Disability doesn't hold us back, it's the tools that we use that to, and I think that's kind of the latter part is Microsoft's takes as well. We want to ensure, if we're going back to our mission statement, as cheesy as that sounds we want to empower everybody on the plan to achieve more, and obviously that includes people with disabilities, and rightfully so. It's a huge client base. It's estimated that around one billion people around the world have one billion with a B. So if you're a business, you can't ignore a billion people, or if you have that luxury, hey, but you shouldn't anyway, because I think it's important to kind of create for everyone. And that's kind of the space I operate in and the reason we kind of leading to the innovation toolkit. The reason we publish the innovation toolkit is because, one, the accessibility space is incredibly thrilling I'm biased, but that's my thing and two, I think every company should consider designing for people with disabilities. It's good business, it's good social impact. Overall, there's a huge client base now they can be tapping into, especially as we're thinking of like how are you scaling, how are you considering other markets? How are you considering other clients? So that's a little bit about sort of where I sit in the company and what also drove me here.

Mark Smith: 11:34
It's so interesting that number one, the figure is so large, and then, in part of that, a lot of people go through life not realizing that the challenges that they're facing are more than others, because they haven't been diagnosed, they don't know how to label. You know, I feel it was very liberating when I found that out about myself, that I had dyslexia and that it was okay. I remember a colleague of mine saying that when he read what I wrote, it made his eyes bleed. That was the term he had, and it was because, you know, I will go back and I'll look at a sentence and I'll go. What was I thinking of? Like it doesn't even make sense at all, but it's however it's coming out of my brain. It's not entering or going up my fingers to the keyboard in that same format, so, but it definitely through younger life. It was definitely a disadvantage, right, Because people they would label that as just being dumb. Right, You're dumb. You don't understand, or, yeah, you know, I didn't read till I was 13. And that was part of that, that whole process. What I'm interested in, how? What tools are there available now? What is Microsoft looking at from either? Neurodiversity, dyslexia you know, people that have impairments, whether it be hearing, whether it be visual, even making software compliant? When I was started my career 20 years ago in the business application space with Microsoft, I remember usability standards and they not applying to the software, and it was a massive request for a long time and Microsoft back then weren't focused in that area and of course, so much of that has changed now. But what tools are there available from a dyslexic point of view and for the these other people that have difficulties in these other areas? What's included in the toolkit? What helps? How do mindsets get changed, and and and what's, yeah, what's involved in that?

Ioana Tanase: 13:45
Yeah, absolutely. And let me just preface with something for everybody kind of tuning in. Disability is not a dirty word. Get really comfortable at setting disability, because oftentimes people fear it and fear about talking about disability or talking with people with disabilities because of various reasons. Get comfortable with it. Disability is a good thing. We all we all either have it or we'll have it during our lifetime. It's part of being a human. So let me preface with that. In terms of Microsoft resources for dyslexia, I'm going to talk a little bit about Microsoft tools and then I'm going to go into the toolkit and sort of the how you can use that as well. So generally, there is a lot available in terms of different resources for folks who are neurodiverse or dyslexic. In particular, I'm going to share some of my favorite tools. In word, there's something called immersive reader. It really helps me because I can fine tune the font and spacing and how things are displayed on the page and the reason. It's brilliant if you're doing a shared document. For example, I'm working here and Mark is working there, and then I have another colleague is working over there when I'm in immersive reader mode and I'm doing all my customization in terms of how I'm reading that document it doesn't affect your viewmark or you know somebody else's view, so everybody can participate in a way that is designed for them. There's also a lot of other useful tools like speech to text. So, similar to your mark, my, my writing is a little bit like shorting for SCAD, so like the typos are there, I do not see them. Everybody else does, yeah, so speech to text is really useful. You have also text to speech in terms of the opposite. I admit I don't use text to speech as much because my actual editing processing is not great. But, I find the combination of text to speech and reading at the same time actually helps because it's the duality of input. So there's a ton. If folks are interested, look up Microsoft accessibility and the main website. Actually, you can find tools and resources that Microsoft has per disability types. You can go to hearing, you can go to vision, you can go to neurodiversity and really fine tune the tools and resources. Please do it. It's empowering. Honestly, finding the right tools just kind of is the best feeling in the world. Now, as we're going to the toolkit, the toolkit itself has a little bit of a different structure, if you will, to your normal toolkit, and that's because it's hard to package innovation, but we try it to anyway. We're making a case for accessibility, so we're kind of sharing a little bit about the opportunity under the accessibility space and why we invite everybody to innovate and we break this really simple framework of like how do you innovate? Thinking of people with disability and having them in mind, and then we really bring it to life with examples of organizations we've have partnered with, with who either created really amazing like proof of concepts or companies around accessibility, and we also provide resources in terms of either research or data or data sets that have been open source, that that help. So, going back to your previous statement about a question around hey, what is in toolkit regarding dyslexia? There's a lot of information in the toolkit of organizations who have made a business around neurodiversity, and one of them is called mantra. So mantra started as a way of addressing the gap that exists in the employment market for people with disabilities who are neurodiverse, because most of the recruitment process really are are not customized enough to meet everybody's needs and the neurodiverse population tends to be left behind. And mantra said hey, you know, there's a lot of companies out there who use AI in their recruitment systems, but the problem with that is a lot of the existing tools predicts us as based on past success and if people with disabilities have been overlooked, you're kind of continuing to propagate the same issue. So they said how can we spin this? So their algorithm pairs what they call strengths of each of the candidate with work environments and work environment factors, knowing that by pairing the two and through data, they're more likely to land candidates that are successful and thriving in their roles, as opposed to, you know, forcing a pairing that doesn't work. So mentor has done a lot of this space. So we we explained the toolkit, what they do, we explain how their kind of technology works, and I personally find it really cool because they took something that traditionally didn't work on the market and flipped it on a head on its head and use the AI in a way that is brilliant.

Mark Smith: 18:45
It's interesting in what you say about recruitment processes, even even managerial processes, like I would have traditionally said. You know, in a team environment if we're on Microsoft Teams it's an internal call I would want everybody to have their camera on, and I just saw the other day this very interesting perspective of of a manager who understood his staff so well from a neurodiversity point of view that he knew that some individuals didn't feel comfortable with their camera on. There can be a range of reasons for this. You know. Light, movement et cetera can have different impacts, and this person was able to bring them best, their best selves and their best contribution to the software project, actually by not showing up, for example, standups, scrum standups, that type of thing with, not with their cameras off. And the scrum master was like oh, but the problem is we can't see their body language and stuff. And the manager is like, yeah, but you can understand, they don't even interpret body language like you and I interpret it, and so you're you're making a judgment on them because you might feel they don't look engaged, but they're the type of person that doesn't need to have icon, that they do not need to express their body language, et cetera. So you're making a judgment on them because you can see them right, without understanding that, and it's just like when you really start to unpack this, it's there's so many people that want to bring their best selves, but their best selves might not be in the traditional sense, but, and if you don't allow that, you don't get innovation right at the end of the day. So so it does go quite a bit more broader.

Ioana Tanase: 20:31
I'll give you an example, and this is a real life example. When the pandemic hit and everybody was work from home, similar to you, the previous team I was in the statement was camera on all the time, and it was with a good intent, right. It was more about like, let's foster collaboration and make sure that everybody feels included. So it came from a good place, but it also came from a place of we don't know how. Being on camera 24 seven, it shapes us, right, and then fast forward at the end of the pandemic. You, you know a lot of context in terms of, like camera fatigue, mental health considerations, and people might simply don't want to be on camera for a variety of reasons. So, as we're looking, and it's interesting because you have technology that is popping up that perhaps wasn't created with accessibility in mind, but definitely has an accessibility use case, and I'll give you an example of that is avatars, right, and avatars in teams. Yes, they're still early days, by all means, but if you think of the technology is like I'm I might be a person with disability, right, and I don't want to, or I might not have a disability, but I simply do not want to be on camera because I feel tired. I didn't sleep last night. You know my child is going next to me. Life happens, but I actually am able to use an avatar that represents me and then I don't feel that, you know, I'm I'm missing out in terms of, like expressing myself in a different way. But also I feel that people should still be able to just not have their camera on when they don't want to have their camera on. And our team is very I love our team because there's so much diversity. You know, we have folks who are blind or low vision, who don't want to have their camera on because, you know, doesn't make any sense for them. And then we have folks that in sign language interpretation. So we need to make sure that we can spotlight the sign language interpreter at all times and that's a focus area on the screen. So it just opened up to flexibility and adaptability and awful times. Accessibility is just about the flexibility of experiences that you can provide your users. So when you're creating software, when you're creating product, it's hard. I'm not gonna say it's easy, but customization is honestly key to including as many people as possible, because our needs are different and usually something that works for everybody actually doesn't work for anybody.

Mark Smith: 23:05
Yeah, yeah, and it's interesting, the talent pool that does open up. We have facilities in our company that are designed specifically I'm talking about office facilities with neurodiverse in mind, because it was something I had no understanding. Not everybody, for example, is brilliant at checking off tasks. They're incredibly talented in another area, but because they don't follow or deadlines or things like that, or it can be the fluorescent lights you know has a massive impact on it can be sounds, or an open office plan is not conducive to their best work, and it can be perfumes, you know strong, you know odors. That will be a trigger. There's so many. But you know, our company really, if you like, explored this area and the talent that has come into our organization has been mind blowing to me, because these people's PhDs you know, people highly, highly qualified had never been employed because they would never get past an interview, because they weren't like us, they didn't fit the model of an employee of the organization, they weren't accepted for who they were. You know they're full selves and so I think there's a lot of opportunity, a lot of talent out there when organizations really do adopt and and go on the journey of accessibility for everybody.

Ioana Tanase: 24:32
I absolutely love what your company did. I really hope that more companies follow suit. I think that's so important. And again, it goes back to like if people the right environment for them to thrive in, and they will thrive. And it's so smart, you know it's smart to hire. You're tapping into a talent pool that absolutely has the right capabilities. You just need to give them the right tools to perform. And, equally, by having that diverse mindset and perspective in your company, you are going to build better products. You are going to better to present your client base. You're going to identify challenges that others are simply not aware of, and I think this is where the diversity of experiences is so important, and I want every team on the planet to hire people with disabilities. You're, you're going to be better as a result of it. I'm, I will lead with that and I will die on that mountain.

Mark Smith: 25:27
Yeah, it's interesting, even what that triggered for me, because I was going to ask you about. You know what can developers do now you know how can they be thinking. But really one would be add neurodiversity to your teams, right, because they're going to give you a lens on experiences that are absolutely real, tangible, live. So much I think that Folks building software, if they haven't had that experience, they don't know how to design for it, they don't know how to create for it. It's not on their radar, so it becomes an afterthought, you know, rather than on purpose design, feature and what what happens. Any recommendations for for developers and people running development teams?

Ioana Tanase: 26:15
Yeah, so one you mentioned it is higher people with disabilities in your team, and I'll say all disabilities, because you're gonna get again A segment of perspectives and Life opportunity is that you didn't expect. So higher people with disabilities on your team is one To us are actually developing products and tools and swear, I get a little bit more technical Make sure that. Well, let me start with the, with the beginning. As you identify your opportunities and as you're identifying what you're trying to build or improve, have a thought about how, what segments of the population are we intentionally excluding? An accident in excluding. So think of disability. Think of other things as well. Think of you know, gender, race, income. Think of internet connection, which is which is a huge one, is like does your product only work online? Does it have offline capability for parts of the world where intern, stable internet connection is not the thing. So almost have a I always say have a matrix and Kind of list, items of diversity, if you will, or intersectional factors, and think who are you intentionally excluding and who are you accidentally excluding, and walk through that process with your team and then establish your potential customers and, as you're thinking with people, disabilities, co created them, involve them in the actual process of building products and co creation takes many forms. You know you can have them on your teams and hiring them, like we discussed. You can work with organizations that provide input from people with disabilities and research, and please, pay people, disabilities for their work that's something I prefer is with and then validate your solutions with them as well, because it's important to understand If the experience that you have designed works in the way you intended it to To. And then there's multiple tools for developers. As you're building, tools is like check your code. Is it accessible? Is the output accessible? In terms of, very tactically, as you're building things, test them. Do they work with a screen reader? That's an important one, right, as you're doing, if you're having buttons, are they label correctly? There are so many things in terms of testing for, for accessibility, but it's massive to be able to ensure that, whatever your end Tool is, it's actually accessible. But don't wait until accessibility testing to actually make sure that what you're building is is for people disabilities there's a thing we call she left, in the sense of shift, the development is built in part left. Please shift left all the way to innovation and include people with disabilities in your innovation process, because you are going to have such a better product. And here's the thing. Solving accessibility bugs is expensive. Developing with accessibility in mind Not so much. You're also saving a good penny at the end of the day by making sure that you're starting with accessibility in mind.

Mark Smith: 29:32
I want to thank you so much for coming on the show before I let you go once again. Where can people find resources from Microsoft on this?

Ioana Tanase: 29:40
Yeah, so if you're interested in Microsoft resources, go to Microsoft accessibility, and this is our main website with everything accessibility. And if you're interested in accessibility toolkit, it's our innovation toolkit is also from the website or a key dot, ms innovation toolkit and that's where you're able to find things. And if you have questions, if you have thoughts, if you have feedback, please reach out to me because I would be very, very happy to to gather the input and what folks want to see in the V2 of the toolkit.

Mark Smith: 30:16
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP, mark Smith, otherwise known as NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show from Microsoft, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out. Buy me a coffee dot com. Forward slash NZ365 guy. How will you create on the power platform today? Ciao?