- Hey guys, welcome to another "Doubletap" on YouTube. I am Steven Scott, and today we are gonna learn all about the big event from Microsoft this week, that is Ability Summit. Hector Minto is here from Microsoft. Hector, what's your title these days?

- Yeah, good morning, Steven. So yeah, I'm the lead accessibility evangelist for Microsoft. I run a program around the world, essentially works with our customer facing teams to go and drive active strategies and conversations on accessibility.

- Brilliant. Well, listen, again, we're excited about the Ability Summit. Now, what year are we in? Because this is just, feels like it's been there running for a long time.

- 14.

- Surprisingly, what was it?

- 14 Years.

- 14 years?

- This is the 14th one, yeah. And it's grown. I mean, it started with 80 people in a room, believe it or not, Steven. And last year, well over 20,000 registrants. The thing that I find most interesting is that over half of what we would kind of call our most strategic customers globally are in attendance. Someone from those are most important customers around the world is in attendance at Ability Summit. So yes, it's grown and grown.

- So for people who don't know, right, let's just go right back to the beginning here. Who is Ability Summit for and what does it do?

- To me? You know, it talks to Microsoft's convening power on the topic of disability and accessibility. It's not for any one group, it's for accessibility professionals, the disability community, for the companies that are employing people around the world, for governments, for policy makers. Every single one of those topics will be covered. But fundamentally it's about a transparent meeting place so that we're all talking about all of the issues that impact people with disabilities around the world.

- And I asked that question deliberately about the "for" part, because.

- Oh, you did?

- That's kind of the the sneaky side question that a journalist would do. Yeah, because, here's the thing, it kind of proves the point, that accessibility is for everyone, right? We need to get away from this idea that accessibility is some box in the corner that only disabled people have a special key to get access to. Accessibility is accessibility for everyone.

- Look, I mean, it's really kind of what my job's all about is, we can speak all we want in the people who already know about the topic and understand the struggles of accessibility, but unless we're bringing new people into the room to have this conversation, we're not gonna make progress. And so I'm super proud of the fact that our customers of all disciplines, and I'll just say kind of from HR professionals, to IT professionals, chief technology officers, to brand and marketing people, they're all joining us at Ability Summit now. Whereas I think it's fair to say before it was the assistive technology enthusiasts, the innovators, the disabled people's organizations around the world. That was kind of the main group that started this. But over time, what we've been trying to demonstrate, and I think what's clearly true, is that every part of a business, every part of an organization, every part of a society needs to put a lens on, are we being as inclusive as as we really need to be now in a digital space?

- Yeah, and you kind of touched on this, but I do wonder how you got from that 80 to 20,000 people in a room, from 80 to 20,000, because I think that's a really interesting number to look at in terms of growth over 14 years. How do you achieve that? How do you actually get, essentially people beyond the accessibility teams, beyond the charities, beyond the nonprofits involved and engaged?

- By giving them content that's relevant to what they're trying to do. I mean, so there's no single professional in the world who can do accessibility. Before Microsoft, I spent 20 years in the pure assistive technology, the device space. And then when I came into the corporate world, it was very much more about the built infrastructure of IT. It was much more about kind of the accessible build experiences, the testing space. And then you've gotta start thinking about literally the D&I world of people representation and this recognition that disability talent inside an organization leads to progress overall on the conversation. There's no one group that can fix what we're trying to do, which is essentially create equitable experiences. We need everybody at the table. The content, we're very clear about how we try to build the content. So we have three streams, build, include, and innovate, I think it is, I'll have to just double check that. But essentially, hopefully in each of those pillars, as we would say, you should be able to see kind of what you want to do, but then what you might want to do is kind of sneak out of your comfort zone and go and see what the techies are talking about, or go and see what the training people are talking about. All of it will be on demand afterwards anyway. So even if you are kind of following one strand for most of it, you can go into somebody else's world a little bit and see what they're talking about. The more exposure we give people to what's happening cross discipline, the more people see what they're doing. Lemme give you an example. A CIO and an IT lead in a business will be clearly thinking about deploying the tools that support that workforce. But when it goes into a D&I conversation around what it means to be represented, and what it means not to have to ask for accommodations, and all these sorts of things, it brings real meaning to the work that they're doing in terms of the technology they deploy. So it's super important that people reach out of their bubble and kind of understand their part of kind of the journey of accessibility for organizations of all types. To me, that's where we've really succeeded. I have to say there's a little bit about kind of the glitter as well of kind of like, we've got Michelle Williams from Destiny's Child speaking, we've had senior politicians, we've had CEOs of businesses speaking at Ability Summit all about what they're doing. So it's this also linking of disabled people's organizations and the community, but then also to kind of some of the leading voices of what's going on in the world out there. We have the luxury at Microsoft being able to kind of attract people to come and talk about this topic, which is great. I will say one thing on that, Steven, as well, people always say yes to the invite to speak at Ability Summit. It is really, I'd say encouraging.

- Yeah, that's good.

- It's encouraging.

- Yeah, that's very interesting. Well, look, I'm all for a bit of "Survivor," so you know, I'm all for Michelle Williams coming along, that sounds fantastic.

- I've always thought of you as "Bootylicious," Steven. "Bootylicious" is really.

- Thank you, yeah.

- I would've used for you.

- There's many words you can use for me. I'm not sure that's the one, but maybe it is. Maybe it is. Okay, let's talk about AI because look, AI is everywhere, and I imagine it is gonna be where hardware is something we think we're gonna talk about at events like this, or even throughout the years with, you know, Apple, and Microsoft, and Google. We always get excited about the latest hardware, but I think AI has kind of got people excited in software again. And I guess that is gonna be a big part of the theme at Ability Summit.

- It certainly is. I've been working myself on some disability specific narrative around Copilot. And so the concept of a copilot, if people haven't tried it, copilot.microsoft.com, download the app on your phone, this concept of generative AI in your pocket, on your desktop, embedded in the Microsoft experiences. We're gonna be talking a lot about the early access program and how people with disabilities inside businesses around the world who got first exposure to it, started bringing their scenarios forward. You know, the Copilot and AI, generative AI is not in itself assistive technology, but of course it is. It's not disability specific assistive technology. But what's interesting is people are telling us how they're going to use it. It's not, we've not got a training manual on disability and AI. People are finding these new tools that are built into the modern productivity suites and saying, wow. So lemme give you one of the examples, a little sneak preview of one of the videos, one of my colleagues who's autistic talks in this 60 second snippet about the social challenge of meetings and being able to use the copilot to ask questions about how they might interact in the meeting. You know, like nobody thought of that when we started putting copilot out there, but people with autism are now coming back to us and saying, wow, you think this is just a nice to have in the workplace. Isn't that a great tool for everybody? This is the difference between me being seen in a meeting or not being seen in a meeting. So that's also part of the Ability Summit is, you know, framing technology according to the disability experience is what that that is. There will be more AI than co-pilot though. So one of the things I'm really super proud of is how we're bringing other innovators from different industries in to talk about how they're looking at AI and applying accessibility to their industry. So for instance, we're gonna have GN Resound talking about the future of hearing aids and how they're embedding the latest Bluetooth standards into what they're doing, and how that's gonna play with Windows. That's gonna be interesting. We're also gonna have a brand company, or a digital technology brand company, talking about how they're using generative AI already to explore automating the audio description experience.

- Ah, that's a very interesting one. This is what I love about Ability Summit, because it's creating, well, first off, for my job, it makes my life a lot easier, 'cause you come up with all the topics we can think about and talk about over the next few months. But especially when it comes to automating audio description, I think democratizing that experience would be quite good for a lot of us. And I think also, and I think this is important to say, often we talk about making things easier, or making things more accessible. We talk about making sure we put alt text in our images. Maybe we use AI to help us with that. Maybe we make audio description available. But one of the challenges for me as a content creator, as a blind content creator, is trying to do all this stuff accessibly. I want to make my content as accessible as possible, but is that platform that I need to use accessible to me? It might be accessible to someone who's cited trying to help a disabled person, but is does it work from blind to blind person? And I think that's where this kind of technology gets exciting.

- So there will be some, I mean, I dunno how you knew this, Steven, I didn't tell you about this, but there will be talk about precisely that within the kind of the development arena, the development tools. So obviously Copilot's gonna be part of the development experience. There's been loads of work have being done on Visual Studio and developers with disabilities talking about how they develop. We will have a very interesting developer with disabilities talking about short-term memory loss and how they're using Copilot in their work as well. That's gonna be interesting. But, you know, what you've just mentioned is really the next level of maturity that we need to aim for. You're absolutely right. We have lived in a world where people have built tools to support people with disabilities as the consumer of the experience, not the creator of the experience. And it's next level kind of assistive technology when we really start looking at, are we actually building the experiences? And what we know is that people with disabilities will build accessible end experiences if they are given the creation tools to do so. A hundred percent. But that really is like the next frontier for us all, isn't it? You know, one example that just jumps out at me, and it's an interesting journey we've been on with it, but in PowerPoint you've got designer. Okay, so if somebody's blind and they're creating content for a workplace experience, and they're gonna present a PowerPoint in a meeting, well, they would've built an accessible, rudimentary, functional experience. They wouldn't have built a beautiful experience, or they wouldn't have been able to use imagery that conveyed their meaning. But now when you look at the kind of image creator tools, I can say, "I want a handsome man in a maroon shirt, wearing glasses and headphones in a Doubletap studio." And what will happen is the AI will generate me something that I've got a pretty good idea speaks to that. And so the PowerPoint designing tools are starting to become something that people are having more confidence in. That it's gonna create something that kind of represents what you are trying to build. And then of course you can use the accessibility checkers to make sure you're getting an accessible experience as well. If we can move from a world where people disabilities are moving from designing functional experiences to beautiful experiences. Wow. I mean, we all get excited about that, right, Steven?

- Absolutely. Look, I always look forward to Ability Summit. I have registered, once again, I look forward to attending, March 7th is the date. And of course, like you say, if you don't get a chance to catch it live, you can always watch it on demand as well. Hector, always good to talk to you. Come back again and let's talk more about all of these fascinating topics. It's so good to have you with us.

- Thanks so much Steven.

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