Hi Sue,
I know this one. From the inbox, Press the applications key or shift f10 if
you don't have one, then the letter v or down arrow to move to folder and
press enter. al your folders will be there with the new folder button as
you are used too. Shift control V acts like it should work, but it does
not. This is a bug, and obviously something they did not bring over
properly from Outlook and Outlook Express. They must have borrowed some
code from those programs and forgot to implement that hot key.
To get to contacts, from the inbox press control 3. Hope that helps.
Control 1 to get back to inbox. Use numbers above the letters.
-----Original Message-----
From: Sue Slater
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2016 11:51 AM
To: Adaptive technology information and support.
Subject: Re: [ATI] Fw: Accessibility Microsoft Blog,more on the new director
of accessibility
does anyone on this list use windows ten with windows live mail? I have 2
issues that I am dealing with. I cannot move selected emails to a sub
folder. When I press alt shift v, it brings me to a place that says folder
tree container and it will not allow me to open up the list and arrow up
and down to select the folder I want the emails moved to.
Micro soft accessibility took over my computer and could not figure id out
either.
Also, can anyone give me the commands to get into my contacts so I can add a
contact . i can an add a contact inside an email message from the sender
but not anything else.
Thanks for any help anyone can give me. I am a home based travel agent and
have a lot of sub folders for my individuals and groups so I do not clog up
my in box.
-----Original Message-----
From: Reginald George
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2016 12:25 PM
To: Adaptive technology information and support.
Subject: Re: [ATI] Fw: Accessibility Microsoft Blog,more on the new director
of accessibility
I do not, but I'm sure she is accessible from the Microsoft site, or you
could call their accessibility support line at 800-936-5900 and they could
probably send you a link. I also think there is a contact us link from the
page where the article is posted.
-----Original Message-----
From: Sue Slater
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2016 9:41 AM
To: Adaptive technology information and support.
Subject: Re: [ATI] Fw: Accessibility Microsoft Blog,more on the new director
of accessibility
do you have an email address for this lady? thanks.
-----Original Message-----
From: Reginald George
Sent: Sunday, January 24, 2016 11:06 AM
To: [email protected] ; [email protected] ; Adaptive technology
information and support.
Subject: [ATI] Fw: Accessibility Microsoft Blog,more on the new director of
accessibility
This has to be one of the best articles I have ever read about a hearing
impaired person. It's very exciting that she is now Microsoft's
accessibility director. I think it could mean real changes.
Reg
http://news.microsoft.com/stories/people/jenny-lay-flurrie.html
Director of Accessibility
Jenny Lay-Flurrie
Portrait of Jennifer Warnick
written by
Jennifer Warnick
Talk to the hand!
Fight or flee. Sink or swim. Face the music or become a grocery clerk.
Every life has its moments of truth, and one of Jenny Lay-Flurrie’s came in
her twenties. She was working for an Internet company, Energis and things
were going very well. So well, in fact, that she was offered a promotion
managing customer support call centers in Europe. She’d make more money, but
it was more responsibility, including managing remote workers, which meant
using a mobile phone. Her heart sank when she realized what this meant. She
couldn’t take the promotion, because her ability to use a mobile phone was
declining. And she couldn’t use a mobile phone because she’s been deaf
nearly her whole life.
“I’ve finally done it,” she thought. “I’ve hit my wall.”
Feeling defeated, she walked to a nearby Safeway filled out a job
application. Sparkling character that she is, the grocery store hired her
immediately.
When she returned to give her resignation to her boss Ian Furness, he
responded in a characteristically colorful, “northern English” manner.
“Bullshit.”
In the weeks that followed, Furness launched into action to help accommodate
his employee, arranging for an office accessibility study, classes to
educate the company about hard of hearing and deafness and government aid
from the United Kingdom to buy Lay-Flurrie top-of-the-line digital hearing
aids (which cost roughly the same as a new motorcycle and matching sidecar).
“The digital hearing aids were the bomb,” she said, though even years later,
she is visibly uncomfortable when she gets to this part of the story.
“No one wants to be considered a cost. I just kind of had to stand back and
swallow while all of this happened,” she said. “We all have social stigmas,
and at the time, one of mine was that there was always going to be a limit
to what I could do as a person with deafness. Ian helped me snap out of
that.”
Facing her truth to avoid a future stocking shelves was one of the most
important moments in her life, but Lay-Flurrie would face a gauntlet of
other personal and professional challenges before coming into her own. She’s
taken to calling such challenges “brick-wall moments.”
“There will be more epiphany moments in my future,” Lay-Flurrie said. “I’m
still very ‘deceptively deaf,’ as I have speech, I have an English accent, I’m
smart, I read body language and together, it confuses people.”
She’s not the only one – 70 percent of disabilities are invisible, she said.
“My commitment is to face brick wall moments head on and climb the bloody
wall rather than trying to resign.”
“However, all that may change. If you believe the doctors, I will lose my
speech at some point, although they have been saying that for 20 years, and
there will be other jobs that push and challenge me. My commitment is to
face those brick wall moments head on and climb the bloody wall rather than
trying to resign.”
Even in her difficult moment, Furness saw in his young employee many of the
qualities that Lay-Flurrie’s managers and colleagues at Microsoft would
later recognize – a “dynamic leader, a natural storyteller, an advocate for
customers” and someone who is “competitive, courageous, grounded by purpose,
and able to put people at ease and enlist hearts and minds.”
Lay-Flurrie is now senior director for accessibility, online safety and
privacy at Microsoft.
With her Union Jack wristwatch and her “Keep Calm and Carry On” office
decorations, she’s also a bit of a one-woman British embassy at the company’s
Redmond, Wash., headquarters. Lay-Flurrie regularly incorporates phrases
like “that’s pants” (British for “no good”) into conversation, which flows
like the afternoon tea at The Ritz London because she’s also a gold-medal
lip reader with perfect speech.
“The bee’s knees, taking the mickey out of people – my colleagues call them
Jenny-isms, but I told them ‘That’s just boggins! They’re British-isms!’”
She is petite with a brown sugar-colored bob and an expressive, ivory face.
Twin dimples give her an air of primness, but her eyes have an ever-present
glint of mischief that – even behind her plum-colored glasses – hint at some
spectacular prank on the horizon.
Add to all of this her wry sense of humor, her faux cantankerousness, her
crisp accent, and she’s basically the Pacific Northwest’s answer to Emma
Thompson.
“The bee’s knees, taking the mickey out of people – my colleagues call them
Jenny‑isms, but I told them ‘That’s just boggins! They’re British‑isms!’”
As a toddler, she had measles followed by ear infection after ear infection.
Each time her ear drums burst, her hearing became more damaged.
“All I remember is the spots,” she said. “I was pretty young – before
immunizations.”
The daughter of two teachers, Lay-Flurrie said she had a “normal, suburban”
upbringing in Birmingham, England, a city a couple of hours north of London.
“If you knew where I was from you’d say I don’t have an accent at all,”
Lay-Flurrie jokes. (The Birmingham accent is notably thick, perhaps best
demonstrated by a native son like Ozzy Osbourne.)
When she was young, her hearing loss was classified as “mild to moderate,”
meaning she could hear sounds, but not whispers. Lay-Flurrie despised her
hearing aids.
“They made me look different,” she said. “I used to ditch them. I put them
in the wash more times than I could count.”
Jenny playing the clarinet'
Her mother tried a different tactic. She sat for hours with her little girl
in front of the mirror playing with lip movements, making sounds and
practicing words. That relentless mirror time resulted in Lay-Flurrie’s
crystal-clear speech and stellar lip-reading abilities, skills that would
serve her well even as her hearing continued to decline.
Despite her hearing limitations, Lay-Flurrie always loved music. She grew up
pounding out rhythms on sauce pans and watching Top of the Pops on Thursday
nights (sitting right next to the speakers for full effect). As a toddler,
her parents found her in front of the television playing the theme song from
“Heidi” on the recorder. At nine, she took up the clarinet.
“I was all about the feel and sound of music, and at that point I could
still pick some of it up,” she said.
When she was a teenager, trying to fit in by hiding her deafness whenever
possible, the song “Push It” by Salt-n-Pepa was on Top of the Pops. Lip
reading could only get her so far, and Lay-Flurrie wanted to be able to sing
along with her friends. She memorized the liner notes so that when the song
came on, she’d be prepared with the right words.
“Such a good song,” she said, wistfully.
While Lay-Flurrie had become a champion lip-reader, her younger sister (born
with congenital hearing loss) preferred hearing aids. Growing up, the family
relied on those tools for communicating. Her parents taught their daughters
they could do anything.
“Their mantra, all the way through, was ‘You can do anything if you set your
mind to it, the only thing stopping you is you,’” she said. “They just have
this very optimistic and enthusiastic approach to everything I do.”
“My parents’ mantra was 'The only thing stopping you is you.'”
This is exactly how a girl with hearing loss (and her clarinet) enrolled in
the University of Sheffield to pursue a bachelor’s degree in music. By that
time, her hearing loss was medically classified as “moderate to severe.”
“People told me going into music was insane,” Lay-Flurrie said.
The sheet music was easy – she could read it like a book. She recorded
lectures with a DVD recorder and had them transcribed. And her clarinet – it
was an extension of her own voice.
“It resonates,” she said. “It’s a big piece of wood that gives off clear,
distinct vibrations that I find very lyrical.”
Still, she struggled – deeply at times.
“I was the deaf girl in a hearing world, and at school I was verbal, but my
hearing was already at a moderate loss. I’d often respond with ‘What? Huh?’”
Lay-Flurrie said. “I was fiercely determined to not let my disability define
me, but I wasn’t strong about it. It was something I felt I had to hide.
Looking back, something wish I hadn’t hidden it.”
Along with music, college taught Lay-Flurrie that with enough perseverance,
it was technically possible for her to blend seamlessly into the hearing
world without attracting any attention to her disability. This approach, she
would later find, would take an exhaustive personal toll.
It’s a Friday afternoon, and Lay-Flurrie is in her office at Microsoft
examining proofs of a sticker she had custom-made for the back of her ski
coat. It reads: “DEAF BRITISH BE WARNED”
“The punctuation needs work,” she said.
She was rattled by a recent incident on the ski hill when several people
whizzed by angrily, thinking she’d been ignoring their calls from
up-mountain. She wants to let people behind her know she can’t hear them,
but doesn’t want to wear a neon orange safety vest like a little kid. Hence,
the bumper sticker.
Lay-Flurrie has come a long way in talking about her deafness, whether it’s
ski stickers, or the joke she sometimes makes when she doesn’t like a
response she’s getting from someone (“I’m deaf to you”), or the purple “Talk
to the Hand” t-shirts she had made for Microsoft’s annual Ability Summit.
The situation at Energis “changed her whole lens on life,” she said. For the
first time, she had shared the severity of her hearing loss in the
workplace. She moved to digital hearing aids and helped her colleagues
understand deafness. With the help and tools she received, her career
catapulted. She stayed in customer support at Energis for a few more years,
then was recruited by T-Mobile.
“My hearing was sliding, and it was getting harder and harder every day.
Even though my voicemail said ‘Please don’t call me, don’t leave a message,’
I would end the day with 20 voicemails on my phone and spend the evening
translating those. It was burning me out, though I didn’t realize it at the
time,” she said.
“In my head, deafness was still something I had to compensate for, something
I had to prove I could operate around – not with.”
Then she got a call from Microsoft. She had long dreamed of working for the
company, but was “convinced it was a pipe dream for a gal with a music
degree from Birmingham.” She told the Microsoft recruiter she had some
hearing loss, but didn’t want to make a big deal about it.
She went through a bevy of interviews – panel interviews, individual
interviews, interviews conducted by fast-talking interviewers, interviews by
people with thick, tough-to-lip-read accents. Like a game of high-stakes Mad
Libs, she strained to pick up everything she could by watching their mouths
move, then rapidly assembled context clues to fill in the rest.
“I literally fell of my chair when the offer from Microsoft came through,”
Lay-Flurrie said. “I had met maybe 11 people without telling any of them
that I couldn’t hear what they were saying and I was lip reading every
word.”
Corporate meetings can be difficult for people with hearing loss, especially
without tools such as captioning or sign language interpreting. There are
people who talk loudly and interrupt liberally, a host of accents and
speaking styles, a festival of jargon and acronyms, and all in rooms with
long, rectangular tables. Lay-Flurrie’s first meeting at Microsoft was a
doozy.
“It was maybe 40 people in a room with poor lighting because of a projector
and scary-smart, passionate people who often walk as they talk. A deaf girl’s
nightmare. I sat there lost for about five hours,” she said.
In 2006, Lay-Flurrie relocated to the United States to continue her work in
online search advertising. Around this time she also got her hearing
checked. It had slipped into “flipping terrible zone.” Even super-powered
hearing aids weren’t going to cut it. The fake it ‘til you make it approach
was not working. Or rather, it was working, but it was utterly grueling. She’d
reached another brick wall.
“I was lost for what to do. I didn’t want to admit that I couldn’t keep up,
but I couldn’t keep up. My boss was super happy, my performance was great
but I was totally having to do double time to get anything done – borrow
people’s notes, do one-on-ones after meetings to catch up, and so on. I felt
very defeated,” she said.
This time, instead of walking to a nearby grocery store to apply for a job,
she asked for help from human resources and her managers. The severity of
Lay-Flurrie’s hearing loss came as a surprise to those working closest to
her, including Denise Rundle, general manager of Microsoft Customer Support.
“I do remember being shocked. It was definitely at least a year of me
knowing Jenny that I had no idea that she was deaf. Jenny had not disclosed
that, and she could absolutely perform well with it being a secret. I
actually felt so guilty that we’d all been going down our merry way – that
nothing tipped me off,” Rundle said. “By her being more transparent she’s
gotten help on things that have made an enormous difference for her.”
Lay-Flurrie only had to ask for help once, and the company’s inclusion team
“went gangbusters.” They connected her with interpreters available on a
full-time basis, urged her to try new technology such as online and on-site
captioning and adapted her office with light notifications. “Now, Bel is my
technology. Bel and closed captions.”
Bel is Belinda Bradley, the black-clad woman sitting across from her.
Bradley finishes signing the last sentence to Lay-Flurrie and grins. An IT
interpreter for more than 14 years, she has been working with Lay-Flurrie
for nearly five.
With such support at the ready, the energy Lay-Flurrie once spent on fitting
in is now spent on advocating for people with disabilities. She joined the
company’s internal community for people with deafness, and went on to create
and lead the DisAbility Employee Resource Group. She started helping with
the company’s Ability Summit, which brings together people with
disabilities, parents of children with disabilities, engineers and
accessibility-focused specialists to imagine, build and enable services and
devices to enable people around the world.
“It was so amazing for me to get to see her embrace her deafness and use it
as a platform to educate the company about the masses of customers around
the world that have all kinds of disabilities, and how we can shift our lens
to deliver the services that meet their needs,” Rundle said.
She became so successful at her volunteer work that she was basically doing
two jobs. After chatting with her managers about where she could make the
biggest difference for the company, Lay-Flurrie moved into Microsoft’s
Customer and Partner Advocacy group to advocate for millions of worldwide
customers with disabilities.
Her day-to-day job is now a vast mix of getting feedback from customers,
meeting with engineering groups, thinking about people, design and
technology, planning conferences and events (like the April 24th Ability
Summit), chatting with employees about how to drive inclusion and improve
accessibility inside the company as well, and championing projects she think
can make a difference.
One she’s particularly excited about is Guide Dogs, a mobile technology
service to enable people who are blind to confidently navigate trains, buses
and getting to and fro around a city using sound and GPS. Unemployment rates
are something like 70 percent for people who are blind, she said, and “that’s
just nuts.”
“It took me a long time to figure out my disability is a strength. We are
born problem solvers, loyal and driven. I wouldn’t change my journey for the
world.”
“It took me a long time to figure out my disability is a strength. We are
born problem solvers, loyal, and driven. I wouldn’t change my journey for
the world – it’s made me who I am – but there is a smarter way to do this,”
Lay-Flurrie says. “There is so much that I can do to help others personally
and in my role at Microsoft. There are a billion people with disabilities in
the world. We’ve got to get it right for them.”
It’s a quiet Sunday afternoon, and Lay-Flurrie has just made tea (PG Tips)
and set out some biscuits (Digestives) in the airy, wooded home she shares
with Tom McCleery, her partner, and Fira, her precocious 6-year-old
daughter.
Lay-Flurrie starts playing her 100-year-old Boudoir grand piano.
Though she can no longer hear the sound (nearby speakers help her feel the
vibrations), playing the piano is still her yoga, her punching bag, her long
walk. After a tough day at work, she’ll come home and pound out some Sting
or Paul Simon and before you know it, she’s more bridge and less troubled
waters. Racket be damned.
“I’m sure the neighbors just think I’m crazy,” said Lay-Flurrie. “I find it
very soothing. I just love toodling away – as long as no one can hear me.”
On this blustery February Sunday she covers some serious ground — Dave
Brubeck, Bach, the theme song from “Winnie the Pooh.” She plays barefoot
just like her hero Evelyn Glennie, the renowned Scottish percussionist who
lost her hearing at age 12 and speaks extensively about how to “truly”
listen to music.
She’s had the piano, a mahogany old dame, since she was a teenager. “It’s
not valuable. It’s actually pretty cranky,” she said. “But it’s beautiful
and it has great tone and personality.”
Personality: It’s a trait she shares with her piano, and one she’s also
apparently passed on to her daughter. Recently, young Fira came to her
mother and McCleery and explained, in her boisterous 6-year-old language
(and accompanied by her impatient 6-year-old sign language) that the family’s
black cat Marmite wanted to go outside.
“Then let her out,” they said.
Time passed. Quite a bit of time. They heard strange noises coming from
downstairs. Finally, McCleery went to check on the little girl.
“You’re never going to believe this,” he told her mother when he returned.
Fira hadn’t been able to work the door lock. But the black cat was
insistent — she wanted out – and Fira had to liberate her. She fetched
scissors from the kitchen and used them to remove each screw from the door
lock. If she couldn’t get the door unlocked, she’d just remove the deadbolt
entirely.
They may never choose the easy climb, but Lay-Flurrie women don’t stand
behind brick walls.
Photos by Brian Smale / © Microsoft
_______________________________________________
ATI (Adaptive Technology Inc.)
A special interest affiliate of the Missouri Council of the Blind
http://moblind.org/membership/affiliates/adaptive_technology
_______________________________________________
ATI (Adaptive Technology Inc.)
A special interest affiliate of the Missouri Council of the Blind
http://moblind.org/membership/affiliates/adaptive_technology
_______________________________________________
ATI (Adaptive Technology Inc.)
A special interest affiliate of the Missouri Council of the Blind
http://moblind.org/membership/affiliates/adaptive_technology
_______________________________________________
ATI (Adaptive Technology Inc.)
A special interest affiliate of the Missouri Council of the Blind
http://moblind.org/membership/affiliates/adaptive_technology
_______________________________________________
ATI (Adaptive Technology Inc.)
A special interest affiliate of the Missouri Council of the Blind
http://moblind.org/membership/affiliates/adaptive_technology
