When clients come to visit us at the Avanade Innovation Center in Barcelona, I often share the anecdote about how I got interested in cloud-based artificial intelligence technologies. It was thanks to Saqib Shaikh, a software engineer at Microsoft, who also happens to be visually impaired. In 2015, Saqib Shaikh developed an application, Seeing AI, to show the power of technology and the potential impact it can have on the life of people with low or no vision. Using the camera on a phone, the Seeing AI app plays the role of a good friend or a sighted guide, simply describing the world around you. Just hold up your phone and hear the description: The Seeing AI app can read a short text or scan an entire document; it can recognize products, people and other objects like currency; and it captures the colours too, doing all these amazing things in multiple languages. That's truly game changing for someone with a visual impairment, isn't it?

At Avanade, we use technology to help engineers improve quality control processes through artificial vision, thus making machines safer; we empower doctors to run simulations of complex interventions through mixed reality; we enable manufacturing operators to make better decisions and automate their tasks through digital twins. And all of these technologies do not only apply to business, but they can also be used to improve the life of people with disabilities.

One example: Last summer, Avanade had the opportunity to sponsor the Gen-E 2022 event and got to meet a team of young entrepreneurs named Sign Text , who is using the technology to break down barriers for the speaking-impaired and hearing-impaired community. They created an application that leverages AI to translate sign language gestures into text and audio for digital platforms such as Microsoft Teams and WhatsApp.

I have asked a few Avanade colleagues to share their lived experiences with the technologies that make their working day-to-day life easier.

Luis Alberto Fernandez, Senior Analyst, Spain

I’m a deaf person – I have profound deafness. I recently got a cochlear implant to improve my hearing, and I am still going to rehabilitation to learn to hear words and phrases. It is a very hard and prolonged process, and I’m not yet able to understand colleagues speaking orally. Thanks to Microsoft, I can overcome some barriers via Teams, which is every day becoming more inclusive and accessible. Although at the beginning it was not an easy-to-use tool for deaf people, we worked together with Accenture to propose improvements that have been implemented already. In Teams, we can now follow meetings, transcribing the audios to subtitles in several languages – my mother tongue is Spanish – and we can also chat by writing without having to make phone calls.

Érica Hori, Director, Brazil

As the leader of Multiplus, an I&D group in Brazil for People with Disabilities (PWDs), I had the pleasure of supporting initiatives to provide more accessibility for our people. Some of these actions are related to processes, thinking on PWDs’ experiences, to make them feel more embraced. But involving technologies, for deaf people, we adopted a tablet, which has a software for simultaneously transcription that help them identify who is really speaking at moment. It’s different from Live Captions function, which transcription isn´t related to who is the speaker. We have established the tablet acquisition as part of hiring process of deaf people, assuring that they will have the equipment since day one at Avanade.

Rebecca Jackson, Senior Consultant, Australia

As a person with chronic illnesses who is also neurodiverse, I have learned to quickly pick up and adapt to anything, which helps me be more effective at work and in life. I’m continually impressed with how advances in technology present opportunities for people with disabilities, and how those advances generally benefit everyone. Some of my favourite Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Viva features in recent years significantly help me manage the balance of work, life and disability.

The ability to focus and concentrate on work, important for working effectively with ADHD. I use dark modes and themes to improve colour contrast wherever possible and frequently turn on focus mode or immersive reader in Word for distraction free writing and reading. Narrator is one of many accessibility features available and is incredibly useful when consuming large areas of text. In MS Teams with the power of Viva Insights I can make time to focus and block out time to ensure I take the breaks we all need, but that allows me to exercise, take medication and context switch in a day full of meetings.

I’m most excited about the opportunities that avatars and the metaverse present for people who are not always able, or confident to present their “real” self in a work environment. Since using the private preview of Mesh Avatars in Microsoft Teams I have been able to confidently attend meetings where I might otherwise have needed to cancel or turn my camera off. For me, chronic illness means that many days I can work, but appear unwell or have obvious physical symptoms. This small difference can give me the confidence to participate fully.

For me, the most important part of all of this is that Avanade is a workplace that embraces diversity and difference. It’s through the support of an inclusive workplace that access to these tools, permission to use them, and an environment of judgement-free psychological safety, that I can bring my best and most effective self to work.