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Paralympian Lex Gillette’s top 7 AI tools for accessibility

Discover the AI innovations empowering lives on and off the athletic track

Human sighted guides are instrumental in supporting blind athletes. They offer comprehensive instructions on adaptations, training, and methodologies. Today, much like a guide, Azure OpenAI Service is helping power Microsoft apps that help people accomplish their goals, no matter how large. Copilot for Microsoft 365 can automate tasks and generate content, Microsoft Translator can bridge linguistic barriers, and tools like Seeing AI can read documents and describe immediate surroundings making it easier than ever to navigate the world. For Paralympian Champion long jumper Lex Gillette, technology with accessible design helps him thrive on and off the field.

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Refusing to let blindness limit ambitions

At the age of eight, Gillette faced a life-altering challenge when he was diagnosed with recurrent retinal detachments. Despite undergoing numerous surgeries, Gillette lost his sight entirely. With the support of his mother, educators, and mentors, Gillette adapted to his new way of living, refusing to let his blindness limit his ambitions. He turned to sports, where he found not only an outlet for his energy and competitiveness but also a platform to showcase his extraordinary abilities.

In the Paralympic world, guides use audible cues, enabling athletes to better gauge their run-up and take-off points, and they provide safety protocols and injury prevention strategies to ensure athletes can train effectively while minimizing risks. Under the guidance of his coach, Brian Whitmer, he learned to run and jump without the ability to see, using the sound of his coach’s voice.

“Athletes with sight are able to see other successful sprinters,” explains Gillette. “When you can’t see you’re reliant on your guide to help you understand what you need to do with your body to get better results.”

With a career boasting multiple Paralympic medals in the long jump, including silver medals across five consecutive Paralympic Games (2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020), Gillette has solidified his status as one of the most accomplished athletes in the field. He holds the world record in the T11 (totally blind classification) long jump category and has earned numerous championships and accolades in both national and international competitions.In 2016, Lex Gillette was in sixth place when he took his starting position for the long jump. He had already started sprinting when he realized that the sound of the enthusiastic crowd was prohibiting him from hearing his guide. He could have chosen to start over. But he chose to persevere.

 “I had a decision to make,” says Gillette. “I could have stopped running. Gone back and waited for them to be quiet.”

Instead, Gillette jumped. He went from sixth place to winning the silver.

Empowering through Microsoft AI innovation

Today, Gillette has set a goal for himself of helping other individuals achieve their dreams, whether that’s through athletics or entrepreneurship. And he believes AI can help.

Microsoft and Azure AI offer a range of accessibility solutions to create more inclusive experiences. Solutions include speech transcription and captioning, content readers, translation services, voice assistants, facial recognition, and computer vision. These AI-powered tools can help individuals with disabilities better access and engage with digital content, whether it’s through speech-to-text transcription, image captioning, or text-to-speech translation.

It’s not necessarily the sight that determines our success. It’s our ability to see the vision.Lex Gillette

Sight School Inc. is dedicated to empowering all ages with visual impairments through adaptive sports, community engagement and advocacy for an independent and inclusive life.

One of the primary objectives of Sight School is getting visually impaired individuals involved in physical activity. “In a perfect world, everyone would be able to go into a gym to work out, without needing to be tethered to another individual: How many pounds you’ve placed on the squat rack; how many miles you’ve run on the treadmill; how many calories you’ve burned, and how to navigate to the smoothie bar.”“Technology,” says Gillette, has been the great equalizer for us.”

Through AI, Gillette can understand his surroundings in ways previously inaccessible to him. Technology can provide verbal descriptions of his environment, such as airport departure screens. Translation apps allow him to communicate with athletes halfway across the globe, identify healthy recipes, manage mobile banking, and hear a visual description of a photo starring him and his young son.

Furthermore, Gillette has found a powerful tool for living more autonomously and engaging more deeply with the world, showcasing the transformative potential of technology in the lives of individuals with visual impairments.

“I like showing the world that with the right tools and resources literally anything is possible.”

Lex Gillette shares 7 things he wants you to know about AI accessibility tools at Microsoft

Seeing AI is designed to help visually impaired people better understand their surroundings. Utilizing the power of AI, it can narrate the world around the user, reading out texts from documents, identifying products via their barcodes, recognizing friends and their emotions, and describing scenes, objects, and colors.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 integrates AI across Microsoft’s productivity suite to automate tasks, generate content, and provide analytical insights, essentially acting as an intelligent assistant that helps users with their work across various applications like Microsoft Word, Excel, and Outlook.

Microsoft Teams supports speech-to-text transcription and captioning for meetings and calls, powered by Azure Cognitive Services, making it easier for people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing to participate in online communication.

Outlook, Microsoft Edge, and PowerPoint include a read-aloud feature, powered by Azure Cognitive Services, that uses text-to-speech technology to read web pages, documents, and emails aloud.

Microsoft Translator is a translation service that supports speech-to-speech, text-to-speech, and optical character recognition (OCR) to enable communication across different languages and formats in Microsoft Teams or Outlook.

Windows Hello uses facial recognition technology, powered by Azure Face API, to allow users to log in to their devices with their face, making it easier for people with mobility disabilities to access their devices.

Microsoft Windows and Xbox include voice assistants powered by speech-to-text technology, which can be used by users of all abilities to control the device and access information and services through voice commands.

Learn more about AI tools for accessibility

Learn more about AI for accessibility at the Ability Summit and read how Microsoft is advancing accessible technology from Chief Accessibility Officer, Jenny Lay-Flurrie: Advancing accessibility with AI technology and innovation.

Explore the Azure AI portfolio for solutions to help reimagine your business with generative AI.

Read 6 ways generative AI helps improve accessibility for all with Azure.

The post Paralympian Lex Gillette’s top 7 AI tools for accessibility appeared first on Azure Blog.
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Modernize and build intelligent apps with support from Microsoft partner solutions

AI transformation drives significant business value, as a recent study of over 2000 business leaders and decision-makers found: 

For every USD1 a company invests in AI, it realizes an average return of USD3.50.

Organizations realize a return on their AI investments within 14 months.

92% of AI deployments take 12 months or less. 

71% of respondents say their companies are already using AI.  

Clearly, we’re witnessing rapid expansion of AI wherein organizations globally are unlocking productivity within their businesses, but also bending the curve on innovation by building on an open AI platform and partner ecosystem. These organizations are engaging Microsoft experts to build differentiated, intelligent applications and modernize existing, business-critical applications. These intelligent applications use real-time and historical data to deliver personalized and adaptable digital experiences with meaningful outcomes, that close the gap between the user’s current state and the desired outcome. New or modernized, when built on Microsoft Azure, these applications benefit from one of the largest interconnected networks on the planet, high availability, and trusted security and compliance.  

Learn More

Forrester Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Azure App Innovation report chevron_right

Azure brings together capabilities for modern app development, cloud-scale data, and leading generative AI in one place. Customers see great value using these services together. In a recent Forrester Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Azure App Innovation report, customers were able to gain significant time savings of one to one and a half months when delivering new applications to the market, increase developer efficiency up to 25%, and reduce app downtime up to 25%. This leads to compelling business benefits such as beating competitors in the innovation race, capturing incremental revenue, minimizing lost revenue and fines from downtime, and increasing the engagement and retention of key talent.   

ISV solutions help accelerate your AI transformation

While Azure provides the tools to build and modernize intelligent applications, it’s important to consider the broader tech stack. Independent Software Vendor (ISV) solutions complement Azure services by allowing you to meet specific use-case requirements, modernize existing tech stacks onto Azure, and mitigate the need to build new skillsets. If your organization routinely uses ISV solutions as part of the app infrastructure or development process, chances are that you can continue to use them even as you build new or modernize existing apps onto Azure. An example is apps built on Azure Spring Apps or Azure Red Hat OpenShift.  

1. Azure Spring Apps Enterprise

Azure Spring Apps Enterprise is a fully managed service for the Spring Framework, built in collaboration with VMware. Building upon the Spring Framework and incorporating features from VMware Tanzu, Azure Spring Apps Enterprise helps accelerate development with ready-made, enterprise-conformant templates. Azure Spring Apps Enterprise offers full integration into Azure’s ecosystem and services, including fully managed infrastructure, built-in app lifecycle management, and ease of monitoring for app development and modernization. If you have existing apps in the Spring Framework, you can efficiently modernize them onto Azure while managing costs and enhancing the apps with AI. Here’s how to get started: Migrate Spring Boot applications to Azure Spring Apps.  

2. Azure Red Hat OpenShift

Azure Red Hat OpenShift is a turnkey application platform. It is jointly engineered, operated, and supported by Red Hat and Microsoft. With Azure Red Hat OpenShift, you can deploy fully managed Red Hat OpenShift clusters without worrying about building and managing the infrastructure and get ready access to and integration with Azure tools, singular billing, integrated support and access to committed spend, and discount programs. This increases operational efficiency, time to value, and allows developers to refocus on innovation to quickly build, deploy, and scale applications. Get started through the Azure Red Hat OpenShift documentation.  

Microsoft also supports pure third-party solutions as part of its ISV ecosystem, to complement native Azure services. While these solutions meet a diverse set of use-cases, ranging from analytics to storage, here’s one that’s likely common to many app development or modernization projects—HashiCorp Terraform.

3. HashiCorp Terraform on Azure

An infrastructure as code tool for provisioning and managing cloud infrastructure, HashiCorp Terraform on Azure allows you to define infrastructure as code with declarative configuration files that can be used to create, manage, and update infrastructure. If your organization currently uses Terraform, developers can use their familiarity with the tool to deploy and manage Azure infrastructure using familiar and consistent syntax and tooling. To support this, HashiCorp offers a library of pre-built modules for Azure services, including Azure AI, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Azure Cosmos DB. And as your developers build new modules, perhaps with GitHub Copilot, those modules can be templatized using HashiCorp Terraform for reuse within your organization, setting up your developer teams for greater productivity and velocity. To get you started, read the blog “Empowering AI: Building and Deploying Azure AI Landing Zones with Terraform.”  

Build and modernize apps with Azure and our partner ecosystem

So, as you look through your app infrastructure and decide to modernize your existing apps, any Spring apps or Red Hat OpenShift apps can easily be moved to Azure, with HashiCorp Terraform on Azure to assist. While we have only looked at three solutions in this blog, your preferred vendors are likely part of the Azure ISV ecosystem. Microsoft’s ecosystem of partners also includes partners that specialize in offering services to build custom intelligent apps, with industry-specific experience.

Connect with experts from Azure who will be able to guide you on your app architecture that utilizes the appropriate technology and services— Microsoft or partner—for your needs.
The post Modernize and build intelligent apps with support from Microsoft partner solutions appeared first on Azure Blog.
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Anzeige: Active Directory für aktive Admins

Dieses vierteilige E-Learning-Paket mit 189 Lektionen und über 15 Stunden Inhalt deckt alles Wichtige zum Thema Active Directory ab, von den Grundlagen bis hin zur fortgeschrittenen Verwaltung und Sicherung einer AD-Infrastruktur. (Golem Karrierewelt, Microsoft)
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