Office 365

On May 17, 2018, Microsoft joins in marking the seventh Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), a day dedicated to raising awareness of accessibility in the digital world. In honor of this day, we are releasing a short film: Empower every person: reimagining accessibility.

This film features accessibility experts from Microsoft and our partners: US Business Leadership Network, Be. Accessible, TD Bank (Canada), and Rochester Institute of Technology. It introduces best practices to build more modern and inclusive workplace environments and how accessible-by-design technologies empower every person to create, communicate, and collaborate. It also showcases new capabilities in Microsoft 365 being unveiled today that make it easier to create accessible content.

As more people across the world join in marking this day and take actions every day to create a more accessible digital world, people of all abilities will be able to fully participate and contribute. More than one billion people need assistive products to be independent and productive, but only 1 in 10 have access. Delivering experiences that empower every person to achieve more is what energizes us at Microsoft to do our best work, and I invite everyone to bring that energy to making accessibility non-negotiable in their places of work and across the whole digital landscape.

I continue to be inspired by the ever-increasing number of organizations prioritizing accessibility, and collectively there has been clear progress. However, given adults with disabilities have twice the unemployment rate of those without, more progress is needed to enable the transformative change we all want. At Microsoft, we found that addressing accessibility requires attention in all stages of product development: design, implementation, and testing. Making things accessible from the get-go is not only affordable, but also beneficial for a broad set of people. Given this, our mainstream technologies—such as Microsoft 365—include built-in assistive technologies and accessibility features.

Empowering people with disabilities to create, consume, and share content in their preferred way is a key part of the Microsoft 365 vision for accessibility. In line with this vison, we created new Ease of Access settings in Windows 10 and built-in settings, such as Read Aloud and Dictate in Office 365. These capabilities are designed to support people with a range of access needs: vision, hearing, and interaction. For example, to make interactions more efficient for keyboard users, we have introduced text suggestions that suggest the top three words while typing in on-screen keyboards as well as hardware keyboards. Adoption metrics are a great indicator of product value. Three years ago, we introduced Learning Tools as an add-in to help the 1 in 5 people who exhibit signs of dyslexia. After embedding Learning Tools into mainstream Office 365 applications and the Microsoft Edge browser, we have over 10 million monthly active users. Inclusively designed tools are clearly beneficial for everyone, and I continue to be energized by the powerful stories of inclusion in action told by people whose lives are transformed through Learning Tools and other accessibility features built into Microsoft 365.

Diversity is a strength for any business, and diverse teams must be able to seamlessly collaborate. Another key part of the Microsoft 365 vision for accessibility is to empower everyone to create accessible content and provide equal access to information to people with disabilities such as blindness, low vision, or dyslexia. AI is already infused in Microsoft 365 to help with several aspects of image, audio, and video accessibility. With automatic alt-text for images in Word and PowerPoint, we give you a head start by providing descriptions for images recognizable by Computer Vision. The Presentation Translator add-in for PowerPoint enables you to display live subtitles in more than 60 languages. Additionally, Microsoft Stream generates automatic transcripts for videos in English and Spanish using AI to convert speech to text.

In the coming months, we will ship new features to Microsoft 365 that will make it even more efficient for everyone to create accessible content and ensure diverse teams can collaborate inclusively.

• Accessibility Checker—Already discoverable next to Spelling Checker in several Office 365 PC and Mac applications, the Accessibility Checker will be enhanced to run proactively in the background. It will alert you in real-time of issues that make your content difficult for people with disabilities to access. For example, it will alert you of low-contrast text that is difficult to read because the font color is too similar to the background color.
• MailTip—A MailTip will be offered in Outlook for PCs to remind those who collaborate with you to check the accessibility of their content if you indicate that you prefer accessible content, similar to the MailTip available in Outlook Web Access today.
• Recommended Actions—A new Recommended Actions menu will be introduced within the Accessibility Checker to make it easier to fix flagged issues. It will recommend actions such as Add a description, Mark as decorative, and Suggest a description for me for a picture in a document that is missing alternative text.

We’re on a journey at Microsoft to design, build, and launch more accessible products to foster digital inclusion in the modern workplace. I invite you to join us on this journey as we reimagine accessibility. Visit the Microsoft accessibility site to learn more about our approach. Share your learnings with #ReimaginingAccessibility and continue the conversation with @MSFTEnable on Twitter.

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Digital transformation is reshaping our global economy, including the way people work individually and in teams. As companies seek to empower people to do their best work, a cultural transformation isn’t just inevitable—it’s essential. Microsoft is partnering with customers to foster a modern workplace that is productive, responsive, creative, and secure. To learn more, read the white paper “New Culture of Work.”

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Today we’re previewing the new Surface Hub 2, built from the ground up with Microsoft Teams in mind. More flexible and powerful than its predecessor, the Surface Hub 2 is designed to fit any workspace or work style. Head over to the Windows blog for all the details.

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Today, at our annual Build conference, Satya Nadella and Scott Guthrie talked about the vision and strategy of rationalizing Microsoft’s platform into an intelligent cloud and intelligent edge, enlightened by AI and mixed reality and architected for the modern computing landscape. Tomorrow, we will share with you, our developer community, the unique opportunities with Microsoft 365 in today’s multi-sense, multi-device world.

For years, we have been at Build talking about the huge opportunity with Windows and Office as developer platforms. In fact, today we have 135 million commercial monthly active users of Office 365 and nearly 700 million Windows 10–connected devices.

But Microsoft’s mission is fundamentally dependent on how well we TOGETHER can harness the power of both Windows and Office in the Microsoft 365 platform.

Microsoft 365 brings together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) as a complete, intelligent, and secure solution to empower employees.

In case you’re not already familiar, Microsoft 365 brings together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) as a complete, intelligent, and secure solution to empower employees. As the largest productivity platform in the world, it’s a vital part of the intelligent edge—and it enables developers to create beneficial experiences that work elegantly across many different device types and many different computing “senses”—including vision and voice.

Today, many of you would consider yourselves Windows or Office developers. Or web developers who target Windows and Office users. Or even mobile developers asking how you might align a mobile experience with other devices. When you leave Build 2018 this week, we hope you consider yourselves Microsoft 365 developers.

New Microsoft 365 experiences empower customers to achieve more

This week, we’re introducing a set of features and updates across a variety of devices and platforms and a better blending between web and application environments for users and developers. Last year at Build, you heard us talk about our commitment to meeting our customers where they are—across platforms. We’re expanding this work to not only bring more Microsoft 365 services across platforms and into applications, but to better connect customers’ existing PC experiences with their phones, helping to increase engagement for developers. These announcements include:

• A new way to connect your phone to your PC with Windows 10 that enables instant access to text messages, photos, and notifications. Imagine being able to quickly drag and drop your phone’s photos into a document on your PC in one swift movement—without having to take your phone out of your pocket. This new experience will begin to roll out in the Windows Insider Program soon.

A new way to connect your phone to your PC with Windows 10 that enables instant access to text messages, photos, and notifications.

• The updated Microsoft Launcher application on Android that will support Enterprise customers with easy access to line of business applications via Microsoft Intune. Microsoft Launcher on Android will also support Timeline for cross-device application launching. Today, your Microsoft Edge browsing sessions on your iPhone or iPad are included in the Timeline experience on your Windows 10 PC. Tomorrow, we’ll show how later this year you’ll be able to access that same timeline on your iPhone with Microsoft Edge.

The updated Microsoft Launcher application on Android will support Enterprise customers with easy access to line of business applications via Microsoft Intune.

Timeline is coming to Microsoft Launcher on Android and to Microsoft Edge on iPhone and iPad.

• Updates to Sets, an easier way to organize your stuff and get back to what you were doing. With Sets, what belongs together stays together, making it easier and faster to create and be productive. As developers, your Universal Windows Platform (UWP) application will work with Sets from the start, helping to keep your customers engaged. And with a few simple changes, your Win32 or web applications are supported within Sets as well.

Updates to Sets, an easier way to organize your stuff and get back to what you were doing.

• Microsoft 365 support of Adaptive Cards, helping developers create rich interactive content within conversations. As a result, end users can approve expense reports or comment on an issue in GitHub directly within an Outlook email or Teams chat. Building on Adaptive Cards, we’re also bringing payments to Outlook. With Microsoft Pay, you’ll be able to quickly and securely pay bills and invoices right from your inbox. Several Microsoft partners will announce support for Microsoft Pay at Build.

Microsoft 365 support of Adaptive Cards helps developers create rich interactive content within conversations.

New opportunities for developers with Microsoft 365

Core to the Microsoft 365 platform is the Microsoft Graph. It helps developers connect the dots between people, conversations, schedules, and content within the Microsoft Cloud. We encourage you to tap into the power of the Microsoft Graph to gain unprecedented context and insights to build smarter apps. Tomorrow, we will talk about new opportunities with the Microsoft Graph and new tools with Microsoft 365 that give you the flexibility to design and create in the languages and frameworks of your choice, empowering you to create smarter ways for people to work. These announcements include:

• New and updated Microsoft Teams APIs in the Microsoft Graph and support for organization-specific applications in Teams, allowing developers to create tailored, intelligent experiences based on the unique needs of a business or industry. Companies can also publish custom apps to the Teams app store.
• Deeper SharePoint integration into Microsoft Teams, enabling people to pin a SharePoint page directly into a Teams channel to enable deeper collaboration. Developers can use modern script-based frameworks like React within your projects to add more pieces that can be added and organized within SharePoint pages.
• Updates helping you support the Fluent Design System, so you can create immersive, deeply engaging experiences with Microsoft’s updated design language. Now every organization can make beautiful solutions that empower your customers to do more. With UWP XAML Islands, you can access the more capable, flexible, powerful XAML controls regardless which UI stack you use—whether it’s Windows Forms, WPF, or native Win32.

• .NET Core 3.0, which allows developers to use the latest version of .NET and have your application run in a standalone .NET environment, so you can build amazing app experiences that don’t impact your broader organizational infrastructure. This allows desktop developers to take advantage of side-by-side install of their applications. That means that system-wide updates of .NET will not impact running applications.
• MSIX, a complete containerization solution providing a simple way to convert large catalogs of applications. It inherits all the great features from UWP, including reliable, robust installation and updating, as well as a managed security model and support for both enterprise management and the Microsoft Store.
• New Azure Machine Learning and JavaScript custom functions that let developers and organizations create your own powerful additions to Excel’s catalog of formulas.
• Windows Machine Learning, a new platform, which enables developers to easily develop Machine Learning models in the intelligent cloud—and then deploy them offline and in high-performance to the PC platform.

If you are a developer maintaining Windows desktop applications, you can now use all of these modern tools with your existing investment across Win32, WPF, and Windows Forms applications. I’ll also share tomorrow our commitment to maximize your opportunity with Microsoft Store by providing up to 95 percent share of the revenue for your consumer apps, excluding games. For more details on the updates to Microsoft Store, check out this blog post. For more detail on the developer opportunities I’ve mentioned here, check out Kevin Gallo’s blog post.

Some of the things we’re talking about at Build this week are available for developers to use and try out now, while other experiences will come during the next year.

All of the things we’re talking about give you the power to build applications the way you want, with the most flexibility to make the right choices for your end users. This is an exciting time: Microsoft 365 enables you to achieve more with your current skillset and your current tools. And that in turn empowers you to help your users achieve more.

Thank you for building with us. I can’t wait to see what you’ll build in 2019!

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