Joe and Jason Grieves, Product Manager Low Vision Windows Accessibility, sure find interesting places to conduct interviews. A coffee shop with a Bose nova soundtrack was the setting for their NFB 2019 chat. This year the pair sat out by the pool with wind, light rain and bad cover songs in the background. Regardless of the auditory conditions, Jason and Joe talk about what's recently come to Windows Magnifier and Narrator in the latest Windows 10 updates. And Jason provides some idea of what is in store with the next update arriving later this year such as Magnifier Reader. To stay up to date with everything going on with access at Microsoft, and to attend their new webinar series, follow Microsoft Access on Twitter
ATIA 2020 coverage is Brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
For the latest news and accessibility information on mainstream and access technology, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offerings, access technology book reviews, and mobile apps, and how they can enhance entertainment, education and employment, log on to AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind's free, monthly, online technology magazine. Visit www.afb.org/aw.
Transcript
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Hide transcriptTranscribed by Grecia Ramirez
From beautiful and – from beautiful, and sunny? -- cloudy Orlando, it’s blindbargains.com coverage of ATIA 2020, brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
For the latest news and accessibility information on mainstream and access technology; Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offerings; access technology; book reviews; and mobile apps and how they can enhance entertainment, education, and employment, log onto AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind's free monthly online technology magazine. www.AFB.org/AW.
Now, here’s Joe Steincamp.
JOE STEINCAMP: Away from the Exhibit Hall, actually enjoying the fountain here. Well, not fountain. It’s a nice waterfall, actually, over by the pool bar, here at the Caribe Royale. I’m with Jason Grieves of Microsoft. You know, last time, it was Bossanova. Now, it’s really weird Creedence Clearwater Revival?
JASON GRIEVES: It’s getting better and better every year.
JS: I tell you. It’s like a K-Tel record, but I don’t know.
Oh, man. So how’s it been, man? Last time we talked was Las Vegas.
JG: -- was in Vegas, right?
JS: Yeah.
JG: That was a venue. It’s been really good. We’ve – it’s so nice to be at ATIA. I love this convention. It’s – just got done with my session and talked about the new stuff that we’re moving into working on, and the questions were wonderful, the people were wonderful. Folks were just saying, you know, thanks to you all and to Microsoft for what you’re doing. And it’s just so inspirational to have folks doing that, so – yeah. Great.
JS: And a lot of stuff just came out in the last update, autumn, fall, depending on where you want to stand.
JG: Yes. The fall update – well, the one I’ve been talking about is the May 2019 update still, and that had the – I think we had talked a little bit about it in Vegas, the mouse pointer experience --
JS: Uh-huh.
JG: -- for people with visual impairments. We worked on a new experience for the mouse pointer. We had some old sizes, and we heard they were insufficient. And so we’ve introduced a lot more sizes, and we’ve also introduced new mouse pointer colors. And so we have nice bright mouse pointers now. And my favorite part of the experience is that you can pick your own color. And I love this because my five-year-old son gets to pick his favorite color. And I love it because he doesn’t have a visual impairment. He just likes, like, you know, the color pink. And so the fact that we built an experience that works great for me as someone with a visual impairment but also works great for Tommy, who just loves the color pink, I think we’re doing things – that’s the goal for me, to build non-stigmatizing features that each of us can use, so –
JS: Oh, no. That means we’re getting a Mine Craft themed pointer. Is that what we’re getting?
JG: That would be awesome.
JS: Yeah.
JG: Yeah. You need to make it really blocky.
JS: There you go. Absolutely.
JG: That would be fun. No. It is – it’s neat. When we ship this experience, we learned -- you know, you get to see what colors people are choosing. And it’s just – it’s tens of thousands of different colors. And, you know, you see, you know, like, the Seahawks green color, which is really fun. So you get people that are just picking their favorite sports team colors and all that kind of stuff.
So it’s my favorite example of inclusive design, where we built it for and with the advisory board, and we extended it; right? A solution for other folks to use because they can pick their own favorite color.
JS: And as someone on the advisory board -- full disclosure –
JG: Woohoo.
JS: -- it’s been really neat to do that while on the Surface Go and kind of do that under the Microsoft experience. That’s really been interesting.
JG: You all have been fantastic. I told stories in the session about how, you know, we – in the past, we would try to get it right ourselves, and it wouldn’t work with customers. And then we’ve started doing more customer engineering. And then we got into a phase where we were designing for you, and me, and now, we’re actually designing with you. And it’s fantastic that we’ve kicked that board off, and we get to talk to you about what’s most important to you and showing you things early on. It’s great.
JS: And quests.
JG: Yes.
JS: It was so neat to have magnification quests.
JG: Woohoo.
JS: That was really cool. And anybody could do it. If you’re a Windows Insider –
JG: Yup.
JS: -- you could do the magnification quests. It’s the same way that you do it on Xbox Insiders, which I’m also a part of. Just cracked level 27 on my Xbox Insider.
JG: Nice. Well done.
JS: Yeah. It’s like, adventure novice now. It’s like, good. I’m not a rooky. That feels so weird. The winter of rooky. Not sure how I feel about that.
JG: For some – in my head, I see my Rocket League in my – I think I’m like, something – I don’t know, very low level. But every time I go up, I don’t know why I get excited. I’m like, yes. A little better in Rocket League.
But to your point about quests, it’s something that we’re doing better now as a team. And what’s wonderful is we do get feedback from people that don’t have disabilities. And it’s wonderful because we hear from them on things that they’d still like to see, and that’s how, you know, the custom colors and different things came about. So being part of the quests has been super helpful for us.
JS: And the ability to get to so much more of the settings with direct links.
JG: Uh-huh.
JS: Because a lot of people, oddly enough, don’t realize, even in Ease of Access, where some of that stuff resides.
JG: Yeah. We had talked a little bit, I think, last time about the ways we’re trying to make things a little easier to discover learning use, and that came up in the session as well. It’s just that we had not done a great job, like, connecting you to the setting that you’re looking for in the Start menu. And so now, we’re doing a lot more of that, where if you type things, bigger fonts, or larger mouse, will directly link you into the right page into Ease of Access. So they’re easier to find.
And we’re – we call it a little techy deep linking; right? From one settings page to another. And what’s really cool is the technology is such we can do that live, so we don’t have to go do a new version of Windows. We can change some of those links. They live kind of on the right-hand side, visually on the page. And we can update those on the fly. And we had – our content writer was looking at some data that people were looking for something specifically. They were searching for it on one page, and they couldn’t find it, and so she was able to make an update to literally make that link for them so they could – what they were searching for was right there, and they clicked it, got right into the page, the volume page that they were looking for.
JS: That is crazy. And, you know, what is really amazing is that a lot of the legacy is still there in the way that you approach something.
JG: Uh-huh.
JS: So with touchscreens, there’s still the border until you move the mouse.
JG: Yeah.
JS: You know, and so there’s still some things that, if you’re used to using the product, it’s not so drastic –
JG: Right.
JS: -- that you’re having to relearn something from the ground up.
JG: Yeah. That’s our goal, you know, with Windows, is to make it familiar and easy to use. And I don’t think we had announced, you know, the new Surface devices when we had chatted last. But that is another goal that we’re building as we kind of build up a new OS is make sure it’s familiar, and, you know, that’s true for the product and the assistive technologies as well.
JS: I wasn’t going to ask about X, but – but –
JG: -- since I brought it up –
JS: Yeah.
JG: I don’t think we have anything formal to announce.
JS: Yeah. Yeah. But it has been thought of and talked about?
JG: We are – yes.
JS: Okay.
JG: And to be clear, just like with desktop, with Windows 10X, we are involved – heavily involved, and we are working hard on that from the accessibility team. And Satya, our senior leadership, cares deeply about making sure our new devices and our new operating system are accessible. I’ll be honest. It’s – I’ve been at Microsoft for, you know, 10 plus years, and we’ve done a lot of operating systems. This is the first one where I’ve seen, bottoms up, from our team and top down, we’re very committed to doing wonderful accessibility. So that’s exciting.
JS: And user experience is a big part of that – you know, speaking from the Xbox Insiders, there’s been a lot going on in compacting the UI –
JG: Yeah.
JS: -- and making it more touch friendly for, you know, other projects that are still off in the distance. But, you know, project X cloud, you can use with magnification –
JG: Hmm.
JS: -- and I have. You know, if you’re using it on an Android device, then you’re locked into whatever magnification is available there –
JG: Yeah.
JS: -- but the users’ experience seems to be something that he really champions –
JG: He does.
JS: -- and it’s coming through on the products.
JG: Yes. He’s got so much talent. He’s – what I like about Satya, he’s got amazing vision for the company, and then he can drill down super deep on the products as well.
JS: It’s interesting to think, because – well, we’re right around the corner from another release, so –
JG: Yeah.
JS: -- what, just a couple more months before we start getting into –
JG: Yup.
JS: -- serious lockdown, I guess; right?
JG: Yeah. The – we still haven’t announced a formal date. I’d appreciated, you know, what the – you know, what we’ve done to make sure we’re making this a great release, for the public release for the next version of Windows desktop. And – so we’re taking our time a little bit more, but, yeah. There’s some really good features that are coming out.
I – in my session, I did demo all the public features that we talked about, and then I did a sneak peek of some of the new stuff that we have: And I think we teased it up a little time in Vegas, but the big feature that I’m personally excited about is magnifier reading. And, you know, we got some good feedback in this session and from the advisory board and through the quests that we’ve done, and I think it’s really come out well. And specifically, the feedback we heard from the advisory board was that, you know, using magnifier and a screen reader together is good, you know, it can work with Narrator.
But a lot of folks just want some, kind of, light reading capabilities, and they don’t want to have to launch a screen reader. And, as well, they don’t necessarily want all the extra information. They really just want to hear the content, not all of the other information because they just want to do things like read an Email, have it read out to them or read a webpage. And so that’s kind of the functionality we started to build into magnifier.
There’s a couple ways that you can do reading. We tried to keep it super simple. There’s a read button just as a play button. And if you’re on a webpage, when you press play, it’s going to try to read that webpage top to bottom. And we know for some webpages, that’s not really what you want. Instead you want to kind of read past some of the navigation stuff. So there’s also a mode where you can click "Read From" in the magnifier user interface, and wherever you click, after you press that button, it’s going to start reading right from that spot.
We added some new ways to get to these settings. So we – you know the magnifier page is getting long, because it’s getting a lot of cool features. But we actually added in the settings button in the magnifier UI: A quick way to change the speed, to change the voice, and it’s just a nice little fly-out. So it’s a faster way to change those settings.
And then, last, but not least, speaking of the UI, it now works with Dark Mode, which is – which I love. The UI’s finally working with Dark Mode –
JS: Agreed.
JG: -- as well as some of the other OS capabilities like the text sizing. So as you increase your text size, all the icons and things get bigger now with magnifier.
JS: And it’s so good because that goes over with Windows Explorer and –
JG: Yeah.
JS: -- you know, into the files.
JG: Oh, it’s so good.
JS: And even in some parts of the new Edge.
JG: Yes. It is – it’s been – the Edge project has really been awesome to see and be a part of from an accessibility point of view, so – I think we just publicly launched it mid-January, so the official version. And from an accessibility point of view, the team is very dedicated to making sure it has the accessibility features that you’d expect.
A good example is something like high contrast, where we’ve always had that in our browsers. And we’re making sure this new version that’s powered by Chromium has high-contrast support built in. And we’re submitting all of that accessibility work as, you know, code requests over to Google. So if they want to take it into the – into their browser, they can. And we’ve been working – we actually have a distribution group with Google for accessibility, so our engineers and their engineers have been working for the past six months together. And it’s neat to see, as much as we are competitors – and we are – to see something like accessibility bridge these companies together. It’s wonderful to be a part of.
JS: Oh. And that carries over to, you know, what’s going on with the X project on a possible mobile device –
JG: Yes.
JS: -- which has been announced, no details have been made available, but I mean.
JG: No – yeah.
JS: -- that was publicly mentioned so –
JG: Yes, it was.
JS: So that’s kind of exciting because for those who were Android fans, you know what you’re getting from both sides –
JG: That’s correct.
JS: -- especially when it comes to magnification.
JG: Getting the hardware, and in fact, I don’t know much about that project. It’s one I’m not as connected to. But I’m also excited for it, so it’ll be fun.
JS: Definitely, and as a fan of – from somebody who has used Windows Mobile in the past and Android, I’m excited to see what comes around the corner on that.
JG: RIP. RIP, Windows phone.
JS: Hey. Hey. You’re going to bust out your KIN any moment now.
JG: That’s right. That’s right. I did have one.
JS: You did? Oh. You had Circles?
JG: I had the mobile popup.
JS: Oh, dude.
JG: Oh.
JS: Oh, man.
JG: It was a cute phone.
JS: It was a unique experiment. Did not last long.
JG: That’s a nice way to say that. Cute experiment. Good experiment.
JS: I say that – when I go back to the hotel, I have a Microsoft Fast Pro 2 and a Microsoft ergonomic keyboard – not ergonomic – universal mobile keyboard at the house.
JG: Yeah.
JS: Yeah. So –
So that’s what’s coming up – coming around the corner.
JG: Yeah.
JS: Anything else that you want to highlight before we conclude the interview with Jerry Lee Lewis in the background here?
JG: Yeah. We got to go listen to more music.
JS: Yeah.
JG: I’ll do two quick ones. For the update that’s coming springish timeframe: So big shout out to Jeremy on our team, Jeremy Curry, led us on some wonderful experiences for low-vision. The first is we’ve worked on things like centered mouse mode in magnifier, and Jeremy said, we should do that with typing. Let’s have a centered text cursor. Right? And that’s great because, you know, when you’re typing, you’re not having to look all over the screen; when you’re typing, where you’re typing is right in the middle. And so that, comboed with the centered mouse mode, makes it so much easier to use magnifier. I’m just – I’m more efficient with it now.
JS: And going along with the pointer and other enhancements that we did with cursor –
JG: Yeah.
JS: -- so yeah.
JG: Exactly. So we have that new – yeah. We did that new bigger, brighter mouse pointers, and Jeremy led us into building the new text cursor indicator. So this is a way for the – people have debates about whether it’s a text cursor or a text caret. So I will leave the debate aside, but whatever you call the blinking, little blinky guy.
JS: Depends if you’re vegetarian or vegan; right? There we go. Yeah.
JG: I like that.
JS: There you go.
JG: But it is, kind of, we call it hats and sneakers as a team. It’s an indicator on your text cursor, so no longer do you have to be hunting for the little blinky thing on your screen. You can now have a way to see it. Nice, big, bright. Again, it’s got options. You can go small to really large, you can change the color and pick your favorite.
And then, shout out to the Narrator team as well. They have numerous things to talk about. The one I was really excited about was they now do autoreading with their webpages, and they have a really good – they just did a lot of, I’d say kind of refinement on the web experience. And so it’s faster, it’s – you know, kind of starts automatically, and I feel like they just did a really good job working on, kind of fundamentals and making sure, you know, you’re getting the experience that you expect on the web.
JS: You know what’s really crazy about that is that the read aloud feature and some of that actually ported over to the Microsoft Xbox.
JG: Hmm.
JS: And so you actually can do “start from here” and “read aloud” in the new Edge experience --
JG: Nice.
JS: -- on Xbox. It’s a real trip.
JG: That’s cool.
JS: So that’s a lot of what’s coming up. I actually have used Narrator and magnifier together, and I agree with you about some of the changes that have come, especially that’s working on in Edge. I think it’s really crazy, the type of stuff that’s been going on in just such a short amount of time. I mean, every time we sit down and talk, it’s a good 15 minutes because there’s so much to go over.
JG: We always are happy with the – when we do the Insider announcements, we’re always kind of giving each other pats on the back because accessibility, we’re always having new experiences. And again, an amazing engineering team, amazing advisory groups, the Narrator advisory group, the low-vision advisory group, it’s a team effort. And we are so happy to be doing it.
JS: So even if you don’t want to get involved on a deep level, you can take on Windows Insiders to go ahead and play with some of these features ahead of time. Just know that you want to do that on a machine that you don’t love. Remember, this is beta software in a way. So don’t take this on on a production machine, and it’s really a lot of fun. There’s quests, there’s information that you can actually be submitting, and it’s updated. You don’t have to do it on the fast ring like yours truly, which is crazy. You could do it on the slower rings and be able to provide just as valuable feedback as you would if you were doing something that was updating almost every other week as we might find in the fast ring.
JG: Yeah. Absolutely. Thanks, Joe. That's a great point that all the new features that we were just talking about, those are on the slow ring, so you don’t have to worry about the fast. So if you can’t wait, because I couldn’t wait if I wasn’t working here, please do check out the Insider builds, and we really appreciate your feedback.
JS: All right. The wind’s kicking up, Patrick’s going to hate me as it is, and I don’t even know what this is, but I think it plays at almost every wedding I’ve been to in the last ten years –
JG: That’s exactly right.
JS: -- something like that. Jason, thank you for your time. I appreciate it, man.
JG: Thank you so much.
JS: And thanks for the opportunity sitting here by pool side.
JG: Absolutely.
JS: All right.
JG: Thank you.
JS: I don’t know where the parrot is. JJ is going to ask me, I’m almost sure of it. But Joe Steincamp, sitting here pool side at ATIA 2020.
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Joe Steinkamp is no stranger to the world of technology, having been a user of video magnification and blindness related electronic devices since 1979. Joe has worked in radio, retail management and Vocational Rehabilitation for blind and low vision individuals in Texas. He has been writing about the A.T. Industry for 15 years and podcasting about it for almost a decade.
