Windows
Windows
Earlier this year we announced : system-wide live captions, Focus sessions, voice access and more natural voices for Narrator. As those features start to become available today, we wanted to pull back the curtain and share a bit more about how the culture of inclusion within the Windows engineering team has helped to foster the development of more inclusive and delightful Windows experiences for everyone. That culture has three main ingredients: people, process and ambition.
Drawing on his own lived experience and feedback from the community, Jeff helped bring new natural sounding voices to Narrator. These new voices use that more closely mirror natural speech, making everything from browsing the web to reading and authoring documents more enjoyable for users who listen to their screens rather than looking at them.
Alexis Kane is the product manager behind Focus sessions, a new experience on Windows 11 that uses proven techniques to build healthy digital habits and get more done. Alexis has ADHD and personally felt how notification distractions impacted her productivity. This is how Alexis describes her experience:
With Focus sessions and Do Not Disturb, users have a simple way to quiet down Windows and focus on the work they need to get done. When you start a new focus session, Windows will turn on Do Not Disturb, which silences notifications, and turn off task bar badges as well as flashing of applications on the task bar. Focus is also integrated with the Clock App, so it launches a timer to help you focus and reminds you to take breaks, which is proven to improve productivity.
The makeup of our team: as diverse as the communities we aim to empower
On the Windows Accessibility team we embrace the disability motto, “nothing about us without us”: to create products that empower each of us, ideally the creators should be as diverse as their audience. When we built the team that would be developing the accessibility experiences for Windows 11, we very intentionally hired people with disabilities to drive those investments, so that their lived experiences could help inform and guide the design of the solutions. Let’s meet a few of the product makers behind the new Narrator and Focus enhancements in Windows 11: Jeff Bishop and Alexis Kane. Jeff Bishop is the product manager driving Narrator, the built-in screen reader in Windows. Jeff has been blind since birth and has dedicated his career to building experiences that empower people who are blind. And over the past few years, Jeff has led the way in making Narrator easier and more delightful to use. As he tells it:As a screen reader user myself, I truly understood the need for some changes to Narrator’s voice. Listening to that voice all day while working, reading an article or book, or just surfing the web on the sofa – it needs to be a delightful experience. To develop the new natural sounding voices for Narrator – “Aria,” “Guy” and “Jenny” – we had to figure out what made a voice “great” for a screen reader user. I spent considerable time with our engineering team to improve responsiveness and other characteristics of the voices, and we tested and gathered tons of feedback to ensure they met my needs as a user and for the needs of all screen reader users around the world.
Drawing on his own lived experience and feedback from the community, Jeff helped bring new natural sounding voices to Narrator. These new voices use that more closely mirror natural speech, making everything from browsing the web to reading and authoring documents more enjoyable for users who listen to their screens rather than looking at them.
The way my computer behaves in a day influences my mood, my productivity and my energy levels. This became ever more apparent with virtual work when I had no break from my computer. The number of notifications I was receiving increased significantly and so did my anxiety levels. When I see a notification, I immediately start thinking about the topic of that message, how I will respond, how others are going to respond and that I should reply immediately. I also didn’t feel like I could turn my notifications off because then I would be distracted all day wondering what I was missing out on.
I am very much not alone in these feelings, and this is why we knew we had to do something to calm down the PC and reduce distractions for users. We started thinking very broadly about how we could create a calmer environment on the PC and through lots of design iterations and customer feedback, we created Focus sessions and Do Not Disturb.
With Focus sessions and Do Not Disturb, users have a simple way to quiet down Windows and focus on the work they need to get done. When you start a new focus session, Windows will turn on Do Not Disturb, which silences notifications, and turn off task bar badges as well as flashing of applications on the task bar. Focus is also integrated with the Clock App, so it launches a timer to help you focus and reminds you to take breaks, which is proven to improve productivity.