DAISY, Office, Accessibility
More so than any other topic, I really want to focus this blog on accessibility because working in this area is by far the most rewarding part of my job (It’s not like service packs and Word aren’t fun. To be blunt, it’s just that thought of making technology usable for more people really makes me happy). To that end I thought I would cover two things in this post. First, I started off with a bit on how and why we think about accessibility so much in the Office group. This post ends with an update on the progress of the DAISY translator work (and what YOU can do to get involved and help in this effort).
Office and Accessibility: Why?
One thing that continues to surprise me as I do more and more work around accessibility is the lack of awareness. The typical conversation goes something like:
Curious Jon: So what do you do at Microsoft?
Reed: I drive A, B, and most importantly, our accessibility work for Office.
Curious Jon: What is accessibility?
Typically we then launch into a long discussion about all the technologies out there, who it impacts, legal ramifications and so on; however, I think one area we tend to undersell is the “who it impacts” category and so I thought this would be a great place to start. Assistive Technology (AT) will touch just about everyone at some point in their life. Consider the following from a study done by Forester a few years back:
In the 2003 we find that tens of millions of working age adults have a need for assistive technology. Considering that this is the U.S. alone where there is good medical treatment, decent education system, etc. you can quickly extrapolate just how big of a need this is on the global scale. Factoring in nations like China with billions of people or countries in Africa that could utilize existing AT to aid with things like illiteracy (That’s right, there is AT out there for that!) the market need as an aggregate quickly races into the hundreds of millions of people. The realization that there are that many people in need is like being hit in the gut by Mike Tyson in his heyday. Today, around the world, there are hundreds of millions of people who could work, learn, explore, and even live better.
The challenge is even more interesting when you consider it’s only going to get more complicated. The same issues that face sectors like health care, social security, etc. also impact technology. Unsurprisingly, Forester found that the need for assistive technologies is going to increase dramatically over the next few years. Just like any other major public sector, as the working population ages and the general computer user population consists of a larger ratio of older users (The same study clearly demonstrates that older users have more of a need assistive technology, in my grandmother’s and parents case this assistive technology is known as Reed’s cell phone number) the demands for specialized support go up dramatically.
So in the Office group, there are two key reasons we are focusing so many resources in this area. Number one, ensuring that all people have access to technology is one of our core goals as a company. At Microsoft, our mission is to enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential. I can’t think of a single area where more impact can be made than accessibility. The second reason is business opportunity. With hundreds of millions of people in the world desperate for a better computing experience, there is a lot that can be done to address this market. This is also one of the things I want to evangelize more in 2008. While companies should be working on accessibility because it’s fundamentally the right thing to do (and in many cases the law) the best driver of innovation is business potential. If we can show more people this is the case then more competitors, partners, and members of various communities will start innovating and creating new tools. I will certainly be covering more on this topic in the future (the market for assistive technology) but wanted to get this intro out first.
DAISY Update
It’s been just over a month since we announced the DAISY translator and we have made some tremendous progress. The work that Sonata, DAISY, and Microsoft are doing here is truly incredible. I am pleased to announce that first version of the translator produced valid DAISY XML just a few days ago. George Kerscher of DAISY did it himself using Office 2003, the compatibility pack, and the translator.
Even better news is that the first beta (our milestone 1, alpha if you will) is going to be available on SourceForge on January 25th. I want to call out that some of the DAISY elements aren’t working quite yet in the alpha but will be added later. Some other things are rough around the edges but we want to make sure that anyone who wants to can test, provide feedback, and get involved early on. The URL for the page is: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openxml-daisy/. Please hop on there and log any bugs, thoughts, etc. that you might have. I will be using my site to call out key contributors, milestones, and other updates so check back here frequently for announcements on the project.
-Reed
PS
Please excuse the somewhat barren look of my blog right now. I am playing with the CSS tonight and should it have it all pretty and good to go in a few days.
