Keynote: Peter Korn, Director of Accessibility, Amazon Devices and Services; Harnessing the Velocity of Constant Change to Advance Accessibility

FINISHED FILE

M-ENABLING CONFERENCE
OCTOBER 11, 2023

KEYNOTE: PETER KORN
DIRECTOR OF ACCESSIBILITY, AMAZON DEVICES AND SERVICES
5:30 P.M. ET
Services provided by:
Caption First, Inc.
P.O. Box 3066
Monument, CO 80132
7199419557
www.captionfirst.com

This text, document, or file is based on live transcription. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART), captioning, and/or live transcription are provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. This text, document, or file is not to be distributed or used in any way that may violate copyright law.

Good evening, everyone. At this time please welcome to the stage, Axel Leblois and Francesca Cesa Bianchi.

(Applause.)

FRANCESCA CESA BIANCHI: Good evening. Welcome back. We do have a special presentation before the keynote. And I would like to call on the stage the Chair of the board of G3ict and the director of the Mobile Wireless Forum. Please come to the stage. This is a special recognition for the Mobile Wireless Forum and the Global Accessibility Reporting Initiative.

It is my distinct honor to read the award. Mobile Wireless Forum, MWF, Global Accessibility Reporting Initiative. Recognition of 15 years of promotion for digital accessibility for Persons with Disabilities around the world. MEnabling Summit, Washington D.C., 10th of October 2023.

(Applause.)

FRANCESCA CESA BIANCHI: Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

(Applause.)

FRANCESCA CESA BIANCHI: And then I would like to call back Axel Leblois, who will introduce our keynote speak for this evening.

AXEL LEBLOIS: Thank you for joining us for this keynote tonight. Peter has been for so many years a good friend and supporter of everything that was going on here. I would say that Peter is probably one of the best how to say internal champions or advocates for accessibility in the tech industry. And so thank you so much for the work you have done over the years. I remember you that before Oracle, you were Sun Microsystems accessibility, Amazon accessibility. So congratulations for that fantastic project over the years. Please join me here and we will all welcome you very warmly to the stage here for your keynote. 

(Applause.)

PETER KORN: Thank you, Axel. Thank you all very much for joining me this evening. I would like to open with a quote from our founder, Jeff Bezos, that is very apt for the moment that we are in. He said I frequently get the question what's going to change in the next ten years. And that's a very interesting question. It is a very common one. I almost never get the question, what's not going to change in ten years. 
And he went on to say I submit to you that the second question is actually the more important of the two. Because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. In our retail business we know that customers want low prices. And I know that's going to be true in ten years' time. They want fast delivery. They want vast selection. It is impossible to imagine a future ten years from now where a customer comes up and says Jeff, I have Amazon. I just wish the prices were higher. 

(Laughter).

PETER KORN: This is Amazon's tenth year doing accessibility. That's worth some applause, yes, 

(Applause.)

PETER KORN: And it is my 33rd year and it is a fantastic time 

(Applause.)

PETER KORN: It is a fantastic time to be in the field. This is a time of rapid innovation. It feels like everything is going to change in the next ten years. Driven by things like generative AI and large language models. We are already seeing human like texttospeech. Tools like Be My Eyes AI are already providing incredible image descriptions with the occasional hallucination. We heard from Jenny at the beginning of MEnabling about uses of large language models and generative AI and customer service, supporting neurodivergent job applicants, combatting Ableism. We heard from Jutta in this morning's keynote with some real risk in addition to the incredible potential benefits and the criticality of proceeding at the speed of trust. And in both sessions we heard about the criticality of having the disability community involved early and deeply in this new generation of AI to help ensure that this time, the innovations don't leave significant numbers of people with disabilities behind, as this happened too often with new technologies in the past. And, of course, Amazon is also in this space and has been for some time for the last 25 years. Amazon invested heavily in the development of machine learning, infusing these capabilities into every business unit everywhere in the world. Today we believe that generative AI capabilities are going to transform virtually every customer experience. And we play a critical role in the widespread adoption of AI in other industries, with more than a hundred thousand businesses using machine language services from Amazon. Some of my colleagues at this conference talked about how AI is already playing a role in our accessibility work. Dialogue boost, to recognize dialogues in movies and separate it from the rest of the audio so we can remix that back, making the dialogue more prominent by ducking the background. Texttospeech based audio description with machine learning to recognize gaps in the dialogue in the movies to help the audio describer identify where they can put things. Still, this is such a new and rapidly evolving space. How do we navigate it all? I suggest what will be helpful to us to think about that Jeff quote from the beginning and to think about what are the durable truths, the things that won't change in the next ten years. To help guide us. So what are the durable truths?
No. 1, our customer base is immense. 15 to 20% of the world's population, 1.3 to 1.85 billion people have a disability. And everyone who either who doesn't die young and is lucky to live to a ripe old age will join this cohort of people with disabilities, with hearing loss, vision loss, muscle loss. So we continue to need to always think about everyone. That doesn't change. And we continue to build products for our future selves as well.
No. 2, our customer base is highly diverse. Vision loss is not the same thing as hearing loss. Is not the same thing as muscle loss. It is not the same thing as cognitive decline. And as Maria pointed out earlier there is immense diversity within disabilities. Her CP is not the same as somebody else's CP. As we think about everyone we need to think about every type of access feature. People with disabilities want to use the capabilities they have. Somebody with declining vision could use a screen reader, but they might want to use the vision that they have. They want and need and deserve access features that maximize everything they are able to do to deliver a delightful experience.
No. 3, nearly everything we do is of outsized importance to various cohorts of people with disabilities. Accessible shopping, hugely important to people who find it difficult to get to a store or reach the upper shelves or see what is on what aisle or tell the difference between one can and another with the same shape. Accessible books for people whose vision is declining and large print books, the few that aren't large enough. They don't have the ability to turn pages. Accessible movies and TV shows, we do thankfully now have captions available in many movie theatres for many movies if the caption display is serviced and working, if the audio description device is serviced and working. Streaming accessible movies are better movies and are of outsized importance. Smart homes, smart homes are wonderfully convenient. I can do all kinds of things without getting out of bed. But getting out of bed might be more difficult for somebody who has to first set up their wheelchair. Many other things that are wonderfully convenient in smart homes are of critical importance to many people with disabilities. And I don't have to tell anyone in this room about the dearth of employment options the un and underemployment rate. Accessible employment is critical. So as we continue to do work over the next ten years, we should always look for these opportunities of outsized importance and lean into them.
No. 4, a few huge amount of things that we do for accessibility for people with disabilities provides benefits to everyone. Larger fonts. Avoiding thin lines in fonts. Clear contrast. How people see things at a glance. We noticed this on our website. When they are busy, they are tired, clean graphics, clean icons, clearly distinctive contrast in those likewise makes it easier for people to see things at a glance. We are finding lots and lots of interest in dialogue booths, not just from people with hearing loss and I don't need to tell anyone here about how much closed captions have become mainstream. We should always in everything that we do be thinking about how this accessibility work can actually benefit a much wider audience. Accessibility from first principles,
No. 5, you know, when we look at something new, whether it is AI, whether it is speech interfaces, as we introduced ten years ago at Amazon, or other things, we can't necessarily rely on some existing accessibility standard, whether it is WCAG or 301549. These don't fit the new things that are developing in the next world. It is important to think as the next principles or to work backwards from the customer rather than backwards from a set of requirements.
No. 6, hire people with disabilities. Hire people with great accessibility expertise. Cultivate them in affinity groups, in employee research groups. Listen to them at the highest levels of your company. Empower them to lead your accessibility work. Development of Amazon's awardwinning voice view screen reader recognized on this stage in 2016 was led by a blind principal engineer. Google's groundbreaking live captions was developed by a deaf engineer. Engineering for Microsoft CI was led by one of their great engineering managers. You will never be doing things wrong if you are finding hiring empowering, great people with disabilities to lead products at your company.
No. 7, mainstreaming of accessibility as opposed to what Greg Vanderheyden has called special things for special people. It drives removal of stigma because I'm using the same phone as my friend. The same TV as my peer. The same AI. And because people with disabilities are at these unconscionable affordability remains highly important. And one of the things we learned as we did our accessibility work at Amazon over the last ten years was how important it was to customers was in tablets that started at $59 or settop boxes that started at $29 or physical televisions at $120. Build accessibility into all of our products, especially the high volume, most affordable ones.
No. 8, people's expectations continue to rise. Another quote from Jeff Bezos, one thing I love about customers, he said, they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static. They go up. It's human nature. We've talked a little bit in some sessions past about the ADA generation, the CVAA generation. Like the digital generation, we are in a wonderful place where we have a generation that grew up with the ADA. We have a generation of children who expect rightly expect that the television they might buy at a store will talk. That the phone that they buy will be accessible. That everything they want to interact with should be captioned. And they will help drive us and push us to do better in the next ten years. And we need to listen to them and promote them. We need to be impatient on behalf of people with disabilities, divinely discontent on their behalf. As they will be rightly discontent on the barriers that haven't fallen yet. The opportunities that haven't yet materialized. Whether it is from large language models and generative AI or whatever other new technology come down the road in the next decades. Finally, big things often start from humble beginnings. Ten years ago at Amazon we took the very small, very modest step of making the Kindle reading app on iOS accessible through voiceover. On Android accessible through TalkBack. Another modest step turning on the Android magnifier and screen reader on our Fire tablets in September 2013. But then we worked hard to hire and empower great employees with disabilities, hire and empower accessibility experts with decades of experience. Welcome and train talented Amazoneans with interest to join, expand and lead. We have developed some awardwinning features. You can, too. It is okay to start small. You have to start somewhere. But remain always divinely discontent on behalf of your customers with disabilities, on behalf of your employees with disabilities. I think that leveraging these durable truths we are well, well equipped to start to go out and do great things and make amazing new technologies with generative AI, with large language models and with everything else that we see before us. 
Thank you.

(Applause.)

AXEL LEBLOIS: Thank you so very much, Peter. This was a beautiful way to close this first two days. And thank you again for all your support and your contribution.

(Applause.)

AXEL LEBLOIS: So we now have a little bit of networking time for those who are staying here for the next day. We will start a bit earlier tomorrow. Don't forget. I want to express my sincere gratitude for everyone who participated this year as participants, speakers. I want to thank the accessibility services, AVT, and the entire team. I think the amount of work done to prepare a conference of this magnitude it talks for itself. So thank you all very, very much. We are so enthusiastic about what's going on. This Summit has been one of the most interesting to prepare. I would say the level of energy that we have seen over the past two days in a way goes way beyond our expectation. Thank you so very much for being here, for participating, for your active involvement in the different sessions. This was a great event from our perspective in terms of your engagements. And we look very much forward to seeing you next year. I think it is October 9, 10, 11, 2024. I got it right. Thank you all very much.

(Applause.)

This text, document, or file is based on live transcription. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART), captioning, and/or live transcription are provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. This text, document, or file is not to be distributed or used in any way that may violate copyright law.