Jenny Lay-Flurrie
doesn’t want your sympathy. Microsoft’s chief accessibility officer wants business to understand that disabled people are both a market force and a rich source of talent – and she spends every day making that happen.
06:30
Two dogs and a cat are waiting for me. Then it’s getting my 14-year-old, Fira, out the door for band practice. I have a music degree [from The University of Sheffield] but I don’t know I was ever ready to play jazz at 7AM.
07:00
I catch up with BBC News and reply to messages from family in England then check Teams messages, emails and social, looking for hot topics and customer pain points. A separate amalgamation of news feeds gives me what’s happening with the disabled community. The mental health demographic is exploding. Neurodiversity is exploding. Research is coming out every day on the impact of long COVID. Pandemics drive more people to have disabilities – it’s just a statement of fact.
07:40
Traffic is light [in Seattle, Washington]. I head to Microsoft’s studios to record a fireside chat that celebrates a product team’s great work – and also to keep pushing them to do more.
09:30
Do a presentation with the benefits team, which works on accommodations for people with disabilities – anything from screen-reading technologies to noisecancelling headphones. The Disability Answer Desk gets about 13,000 customer calls a month. We talk about how to keep up. More people are owning their ADHD, their deafness. They’re more comfortable asking for help and if they’re not, the virtual environment has forced them to. People with disabilities are demanding more from companies – and they should.
11:00
Meet with my leadership team. We have a hub-and-spoke model where people are across the company, accountable for accessibility in Xbox or Windows or Office or hiring or marketing. To build inclusive products, you have to infuse voices all through the process.
12:00
My office has been pranked. There’s been a cardboard cut-out of President Obama in the corner since I received a Champion of Change award at the White House in 2014. Today, my business manager put my husband’s face on it. When you work with tough content, you need to have fun.
12:30
We nip over to the canteen. I can walk in, hit a few buttons and my order pops up. If you get dropped off, there’s a tactile rail from the curb to the door. Ordering platforms can be audio, braille, tactile. We changed the screens to red and blue so we’re not hitting on colour blindness.
There can be a perception that disability is something to be accommodated. But I’m proud of who I am, including my deafness. I have a leg that doesn’t work well. I’m getting old. Other parts of me will break. But that doesn’t mean I need your sympathy. Work with me! I want businesses to see disability as a talent pool, a strength, an expertise – and if they don’t have people with disabilities, or advertise that they do, they are missing out.
15:00
Press interview. My job is to support the ecosystem maturity, from hiring to creating new technologies and researching the future. I don’t do it alone. I have
a wicked team. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported a 78 per cent increase in accessibility job listings year on year. But there were still only 12,000. So how does Microsoft help elevate the coolness of being an accessibility nerd and get more people into our gang?
15:30
Talk with a senior program manager about upcoming conferences. There’s focus on how we can embed disability into other community events: Asia-Pacific; women’s conferences. As humans, we never come with one thing. The intersection of disability and other identities can create social and technological barriers for people.
16:00
An accessibility policy lead and I plan our visit to D.C. to meet with NGOs and disability advocates. I’m glad to get out there again and start picking up what’s important in the community. I’ll also talk with policymakers about the impact of the pandemic. We’re pushing a little aggressively on a few things. Only 20 companies that we know of globally publicly disclose their disability representation. I want to see that change.
16:30
Meet with my boss, Teresa Hutson, who leads the technology and corporate responsibility team. The speed of technology is so much quicker than when I joined Microsoft in 2005. Products ship weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, with new features going out all the time. Changing the name “Ease of Access” to “Accessibility” increased satisfaction in Windows 11.
If I can help people find what they need and turn it on without feeling they have to disclose something, that’s a win.
17:30
Get home. Walk dogs. Order in dinner – only once a week. My guiltiest pleasure is Candy Crush. Or I’ll play Forza Horizon 5, which has ASL/BSL interpreters, with my husband, Tom [McCleery, who works in cloud connectivity at Microsoft]. He tries to drag me to bed at around 10 but I love it when the others are sleeping and I can hammer on the grand piano, quietly. The music is mine. I play for me.
23:00
Bedtime. I turn everything onto night mode so no messages appear between 9pm and 8am. I constantly say to my team: you can’t burn too bright, too quick. It’s not going to be one thing that changes the world. It’s a culmination of a million things and a million people working together. Do I sometimes have anxiety at two in the morning? Absolutely. Do I feel the pressure and the need? Yes, every day. But I’m grounded. What we do could not be more important than it is right now and it has a profound impact. And we have to keep going.