Adventures of a Diva Princess: Microsoft

There’s no doubt that the advent of broadly-available Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers businesses the prospect of increased productivity and accelerated innovation, whilst also enabling society to help solve some of its toughest - and most persistent – challenges: disease, famine, climate control and natural disasters.

AI is already delivering tangible economic benefits for many organisations across Asia Pacific. For example, leading global container shipping company OOCL reports that applying AI to their business is already saving them $10m annually, whilst Apollo Hospitals in India are using AI to help predict heart disease amongst its patients.

While the benefits of Artificial Intelligence are undeniable, AI is a disrupter, especially when it comes to the displacement of jobs. The ramifications of AI on the workforce is a regular topic of discussion among CEOs and government leaders across Asia Pacific.

That said, it is also pertinent to examine the far-reaching implication that AI brings to the workforce. Will the social disruptions that AI can potentially create ultimately overshadow its benefits?

The Evolution of Jobs in the AI-Shaped Future

To put things in perspective: large-scale disruption is a challenge with every industrial revolution. Technology will always have profound implications on the creation, elimination, or evolution of jobs. For example, just a few years ago, it was common for offices to have a pool of typists. Clearly, this role is no longer relevant in today’s modern office, thanks to the proliferation of personal computing. The advent of AI will reshape jobs in a similar way.

Microsoft recently partnered with the leading technology advisory firm IDC to assess the digital transformation landscape across the region. Titled “Unlocking the Economic Impact of Digital Transformation in Asia Pacific”, the study surveyed 1,560 business and IT leaders from 15 Asia Pacific economies[i]. It showed that 85% of jobs in Asia Pacific will be transformed in the next three years. (See chart below)

Diving deeper into the results, the respondents said that over 50% of jobs will be redeployed to a new position and/or retrained and upskilled for digital transformation. What’s interesting is that the Study shows that 26% of jobs will be newly created roles from digital transformation, which will offset the 27% of jobs that will he outsourced or automated. In other words, the overall workforce effect will be broadly neutral.

These are clear indications that how businesses organize work, how people find employment and the skills people need to prepare for the workforce are changing dramatically. These changes are likely to accelerate in the decade ahead.

As AI continues to transform the nature of work, education, skills, and training will have to transform as well in order to ensure that people are prepared for the jobs of the future and businesses have access to the talent they need to succeed. And as traditional models of employment transform, there will be a need to modernize legal frameworks to recognize new ways of working, provide adequate worker protections, and maintain social safety nets.

Building a Better Future Together

The recently published, ‘The Future Computed, Artificial Intelligence and its Role in Society’, makes sense of this AI conundrum as it offers three conclusions on AI and the impact on work and jobs:.

(You can download the book here for free today).

First, the organizations and countries that will fare best in the AI race will be early adopters. The reason is straightforward: AI will be useful wherever intelligence is needed and it helps us to be more productive in nearly every field of human endeavor, which can lead to economic growth. Put simply, new jobs and economic progress will favor those that embrace the technology, not those that resist it.

Second, while AI will help improve daily life in many ways and help solve big societal problems, its important to remain critical when examining the issues that it can bring. Beyond AI deployment, what’s equally important is to prepare society and the workforce for the impending changes that AI will catalyze by addressing the need for strong ethical principles, the evolution of laws, the importance of training for new skills, and even labor market reforms. These aspects must all come together in order to make the most of this new technology.

Third, to fully realize the benefits of AI, and to minimize the negative outcomes, technology companies, private and public organizations need to come together with a sense of shared responsibility -- AI must be democratized.

The AI building blocks that Microsoft is developing today, such as computer vision, speech, and knowledge recognition, should be made available to all so that they can create their own AI-based solutions. AI should not be controlled by just a few organizations. The AI future should be built by everyone with a vision on how AI can benefit economies and societies as well as how we can tackle AI issues and their implications.

The future of AI can burn brightly or dimly. Disruption is a norm, and the ability to adapt to disruptions is what defines all of us. And to adapt to the fast-approaching, rapidly evolving AI future, all parties – from workers to enterprises to governments - will need to spend more time listening to each other, collaborate and constantly learn new knowledge and skills.

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A team of Microsoft researchers said Wednesday that they believe they have created the first machine translation system that can translate sentences of news articles from Chinese to English with the same quality and accuracy as a person.

Researchers in the company’s Asia and U.S. labs said that their system achieved human parity on a commonly used test set of news stories, called newstest2017, which was developed by a group of industry and academic partners and released at a research conference called WMT17 last fall. To ensure the results were both accurate and on par with what people would have done, the team hired external bilingual human evaluators, who compared Microsoft’s results to two independently produced human reference translations.

Xuedong Huang, a technical fellow in charge of Microsoft’s speech, natural language and machine translation efforts, called it a major milestone in one of the most challenging natural language processing tasks. “Hitting human parity in a machine translation task is a dream that all of us have had,” Huang said. “We just didn’t realize we’d be able to hit it so soon.”

Huang, who also led the group that recently achieved human parity in a conversational speech recognition task, said the translation milestone was especially gratifying because of the possibilities it has for helping people understand each other better. “The pursuit of removing language barriers to help people communicate better is fantastic,” he said. “It’s very, very rewarding.”

Machine translation is a problem researchers have worked on for decades – and, experts say, for much of that time many believed human parity could never be achieved. Still, the researchers cautioned that the milestone does not mean that machine translation is a solved problem.

Ming Zhou, assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Asia and head of a natural language processing group that worked on the project, said that the team was thrilled to achieve the human parity milestone on the dataset. But he cautioned that there are still many challenges ahead, such as testing the system on real-time news stories.

Arul Menezes, partner research manager of Microsoft’s machine translation team, said the team set out to prove that its systems could perform about as well as a person when it used a language pair – Chinese and English – for which there is a lot of data, on a test set that includes the more commonplace vocabulary of general interest news stories.

"Given the best-case situation as far as data and availability of resources goes, we wanted to find out if we could actually match the performance of a professional human translator," said Menezes who helped lead the project.

Menezes said the research team can apply the technical breakthroughs they made for this achievement to Microsoft’s commercially available translation products in multiple languages. That will pave the way for more accurate and natural-sounding translations across other languages and for texts with more complex or niche vocabulary.

DUAL LEARNING, DELIBERATION, JOINT TRAINING AND AGREEMENT REGULARIZATION

Although academic and industry researchers have worked on translation for years, they’ve recently achieved substantial breakthroughs by using a method of training AI systems called deep neural networks. That has allowed them to create more fluent, natural-sounding translations that take into account an even broader context than the previous approach, known as statistical machine translation.

To reach the human parity milestone on this dataset, three research teams in Microsoft’s Beijing and Redmond, Washington, research labs worked together to add a number of other training methods that would make the system more fluent and accurate. In many cases, these new methods mimic how people improve their own work iteratively, by going over it again and again until they get it right.

“Much of our research is really inspired by how we humans do things,” said Tie-Yan Liu, a principal research manager with Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, who leads a machine learning team that worked on this project.

One method they used is dual learning. Think of this as a way of fact-checking the system’s work: Every time they sent a sentence through the system to be translated from Chinese to English, the research team also translated it back from English to Chinese. That’s similar to what people might do to make sure that their automated translations were accurate, and it allowed the system to refine and learn from its own mistakes. Dual learning, which was developed by the Microsoft research team, also can be used to improve results in other AI tasks.

Another method, called deliberation networks, is similar to how people edit and revise their own writing by going through it again and again. The researchers taught the system to repeat the process of translating the same sentence over and over, gradually refining and improving the response.

The researchers also developed two new techniques to improve the accuracy of their translations, Zhou said.

One technique, called joint training, was used to iteratively boost the English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English translation systems. With this method, the English-to-Chinese translation system translates new English sentences into Chinese in order to obtain new sentence pairs. Those are then used to augment the training dataset that is going in the opposite direction, from Chinese to English. The same procedure is then applied in the other direction. As they converge, the performance of both systems improves.

Another technique is called agreement regularization. With this method, the translation can be generated by having the system read from left to right or from right to left. If these two translation techniques generate the same translation, the result is considered more trustworthy than if they don’t get the same results. The method is used to encourage the systems to generate a consensus translation.

Zhou said he expects these methods and techniques to be useful for improving machine translation in other languages and situations as well. He said they also could be used to make other AI breakthroughs beyond translation. “This is an area where machine translation research can apply to the whole field of AI research,” he said.

NO ‘RIGHT’ ANSWER

The test set the team used to reach the human parity milestone includes about 2,000 sentences from a sample of online newspapers that have been professionally translated.

Microsoft ran multiple evaluation rounds on the test set, randomly selecting hundreds of translations for evaluation each time. To verify that Microsoft’s machine translation was as good as a person’s translation, the company went beyond the specifications of the test set and hired a group of outside bilingual language consultants to compare Microsoft’s results against manually produced human translations.

The method of verifying the results highlights the complexity of teaching systems to translate accurately. With other tasks, such as speech recognition, it’s pretty straightforward to tell if a system is performing as well as a person, because the ideal result will be the exact same for a person and a machine. Researchers call that a pattern recognition task.

With translation, there’s more nuance. Even two fluent human translators might translate the exact same sentence slightly differently, and neither would be wrong. That’s because there’s more than one “right” way to say the same thing.

“Machine translation is much more complex than a pure pattern recognition task,” Zhou said. “People can use different words to express the exact same thing, but you cannot necessarily say which one is better.”

The researchers say that complexity is what makes machine translation such a challenging problem, but also such a rewarding one.

Liu said no one knows whether machine translation systems will ever get good enough to translate any text in any language pair with the accuracy and lyricism of a human translator. But, he said, these recent breakthroughs allow the teams to move on to the next big steps toward that goal and other big AI achievements, such as reaching human parity in speech-to-speech translation.

“What we can predict is that definitely we will do better and better,” Liu said.

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UnionBank partners with Microsoft to pursue blockchain technology in PH

Today, digital technology is pushing people, businesses, and governments to rethink the way they work and operate. In the banking and financial industry, fintech companies are disrupting conventional methodologies and introducing innovative products to cater to mobile and connected customers that demand state-of-the-art digital services.

Union Bank of the Philippines (UnionBank) is in the midst of a digital shift as it pursues a three-point plan. This aims to transform its operations with digital technology, put up a digital bank, and engage fintechs in catering to the local market.[1]

As part of its endeavours, UnionBank has partnered with Microsoft to conduct blockchain trials on Azure.

“Similar to our mission to empower every person and organization to achieve more, UnionBank is committed to making lives better and enriching the lives of Filipinos through greater financial inclusion. We stand together in the belief that financial service institutions need to ramp up digital transformation efforts to engage users and transform products,” said Hans Bayaborda, Managing Director and Country General Manager of Microsoft Philippines.

Blockchain for greater financial inclusion

A recent BSP survey found that 86 percent of Filipino households remain unbanked.[2] Blockchain can push for greater financial inclusion by allowing financial institutions to provide accessible, useful, and affordable products and services that meet client needs. Whether it’s transactions, payments, savings, credit, or insurance, these can be delivered in a responsible and sustainable way via blockchain.

Arvie de Vera, Head of Fintech at UnionBank, said: “Blockchain technology will revolutionize financial services, and more so in a context like the Philippines where financial inclusion is such a challenge.”

Blockchain is transformational technology that brings down the cost to serve the mass market. At its core, it is a form of data structure used to create a digital transaction ledger that, instead of resting with a single provider, is shared among a distributed network of computers.[3] This promotes financial inclusion by:

Modernizing legacy banking infrastructures. With blockchain technologies, banks can increase efficiencies by addressing the settlement process across the board. Speeding payments, trading of all financial instruments, and automatically outputting regulatory information will massively disrupt the industry and shift labor into better customer service.

Securing transactions. Blockchain technology offers secure transactions through an encrypted ledger. This addresses cyber threats by establishing authenticity and tamper-proof record systems. The decentralization of the command systems in blockchains is critical to safeguarding cyber security.[4]

Azure – a secure blockchain platform

UnionBank is currently conducting and has had successful blockchain trials on Azure.

As an open, flexible, and scalable platform, Azure supports a rapidly growing number of distributed ledger technologies that address specific business and technical requirements for security, performance, and operational processes. Microsoft’s data and AI solution provides unique off-chain data-management and analysis capabilities not offered by others. The vast Microsoft partner ecosystem extends the capabilities of UnionBank’s platforms and services in unique ways that fit specific workload and industry needs.

Azure is secure and provides a rapid, low-cost, low-risk, and fail-fast system for organizations to collaborate on by enabling them to experiment with new business processes—all backed by a cloud platform with the largest compliance portfolio in the industry.[5]

“The Microsoft partnership has also been about sharing best practices and experiences. UnionBank is grateful to have the guidance of such a technology leader—one who has also undergone its own transformation,” de Vera said.

Revolutionizing PH banking

As a tech-savvy organization, UnionBank is embracing digital transformation through its strong culture of innovation and leadership. It is the first bank in the Philippines to pursue blockchain trials.

“It’s an exciting time. The arrival of blockchain in the Philippines is groundbreaking and can revolutionize the financial services industry and lead to greater financial inclusion in the country. As the first bank to pursue blockchain, UnionBank is making big strides in its digital transformation, and Microsoft is committed to helping them make Filipino lives better,” said Bayaborda.

[1]http://www.manilatimes.net/unionbank-gears-digitization-take-fintechs/330191/

[2]https://business.mb.com.ph/2017/01/14/86-of-filipino-households-dont-have-bank-accounts-bsp-survey/

[3]https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/blockchain/

[4]https://news.microsoft.com/apac/2016/11/29/transforming-the-banking-and-financial-services-model-in-asia-with-blockchain/

[5]https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/solutions/blockchain/

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Digital age has brought lots of disruptions in our daily lives and in a whole in our economy. With the way things are and three years from now, it is predicted by a new business study produced by Microsoft in partnership with IDC Asia/Pacific and released last February 8, 2018, that digital transformation will add an estimated US$8 billion to the Philippines’ GDP and increase the growth rate by 0.4% annually.

Based on the research, “Unlocking the Economic Impact of Digital Transformation in Asia Pacific”, the study predicts a dramatic acceleration in the pace of digital transformation across Asia Pacific economies. At the official release held at the Okada Manila, it is said that in 2017, about 3% of the Philippines’ GDP was derived from digital products and services created directly through the use of digital technologies, such as mobility, cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI).

Mr. Hans Bayaborda, Managing Director of Microsoft Philippines shared, “The Philippines is clearly on the digital transformation fast track. Within the next four years, we expect to see approximately 40% of the Philippines’ GDP to be derived from digital products and services.” He also said, “At the same time, organizations in Asia Pacific are increasingly deploying emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence as part of their digital transformation initiatives, and that will accelerate growth even further.”

The survey was conducted and participated in by 1,560 business decision makers in mid and large-sized organizations across 15 economies in the region, the Philippines are included with 100 respondents. It highlights the rapid impact and widespread disruption that digital transformation is having on traditional business models. It also identified five key benefits to their bottom line from digital transformation.

Research findings showed that organizations are seeing significant and tangible improvements from their digital transformation efforts across these benefits in the range of 6% to 12% today. Business leaders expect to see more than 50% improvements in those key areas by 2020, with the biggest jump expected in profit margin and productivity.

Digital Leaders in Asia Pacific to Gain Lion’s Share of Economic Opportunities

The study indicates that while 93% of organizations in the Philippines are in the midst of their digital transformation journey, only 7% in the entire region can be classified as Leaders. These are organizations that have full or progressing digital transformation strategies, with at least a third of their revenue derived from digital products and services. In addition, these companies are seeing between 20 - 30% improvements in benefits across various business areas from their initiatives.

The study indicates that Leaders experience double the benefits of Followers, and these improvements will be more pronounced by 2020. Almost half of Leaders (48%) have a full digital transformation strategy in place.

“The pace of digital transformation is accelerating, and IDC expects that by 2021, at least 48% of Southeast Asia’s GDP will be derived from digital products and services, with growth in every industry driven by digitally enhanced offerings, operations and relationships. The study shows Leaders seeing double the benefits of Followers, with improvements in productivity, cost reductions, and customer advocacy. To remain competitive, organizations must establish new metrics, realign organization structures, and re-architect their technology platform," said Daniel-Zoe Jimenez, Research Director Digital Transformation Practice Lead, IDC Asia/Pacific.

The Study identified key differences between Leaders and Followers in Asia Pacific, which contribute to the improvements tracked:

Leaders are more concerned about competitors and emergence of disruptive technologies

The digital economy has also given rise to new types of competitors, as well as emerging technologies such as AI that have contributed to the disruption of business models.

Business agility and culture of innovation are key goals

When addressing business concerns, Leaders are focused on creating a culture of agility and innovation to counter competition. Followers, on the other hand, are more focused on improving employee productivity and profitability.

Measuring digital transformation successes

Organizations across Asia Pacific are starting to adopt new key performance indicators (KPI) to better measure their digital transformation initiatives, such as effectiveness of processes, data as a capital, and customer advocacy in the form of Net Promoter Score (NPS). As organizations realize the potential of data as the new oil for the digital economy, Leaders are much more focused on leveraging data to grow revenue and productivity, and to transform business models.

Leaders are more aware of challenges in their digital transformation journeys

In addition to skills and cybersecurity threats as key challenges, Leaders have also identified the need to bolster their data capabilities through the use of advanced analytics to develop actionable insights in fast-moving markets.

Leaders are looking to invest in AI and Internet of Things

Emerging technologies such as AI (including cognitive services and robotics) and IoT are areas where Leaders are investing in for 2018. Besides these emerging technologies, Leaders are also more interested in investing in big data analytics to mine data for actionable insights than others.

What sets Leaders apart from others are their ability to ride on the digital transformation wave from an organizational culture perspective. The study found that Leaders have these traits:

“There is a pressing need for organizations to adopt a leaders’ mindset to fully build their digital ecosystem—from employees, to customers, to partners—in order to grow their value chain,” said Andrea Della Mattea, President of Microsoft Asia Pacific. “In this regard, Microsoft is uniquely positioned to help organizations across Asia Pacific succeed in their digital transformation journey. We say this with confidence because we, as an organization, have also undergone digital transformation, and we understand what it takes to make these digital initiatives successful.”

In the study, it is also pointed out that Filipinos have more to gain with digital transformation since its many benefits includes potential increments to potential income with freelancing, creation of higher value jobs and increased educational and training facilities.

For more information about the study, visit www.microsoft.com/en-ph

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If the history of human advancement has taught us one thing it is this: genuine step-change progress does not occur because of a single technology breakthrough, but a combination of multiple complementary factors coming together at the same time.

The Industrial Revolution, which began around 1760, was driven by an amalgamation of steam power, improvements in iron production and the development of the first machine tools.

Similarly, the PC revolution of the early 1970’s was the outcome of simultaneous advancements in micro-processing, memory storage, software programming and other factors.

Now, as we enter 2018, we are at the cusp of a new revolution, one that will ultimately transform every organisation, every industry and every public service across the world.

2018 is the year of Artificial Intelligence – or AI – as it will be the year that it will start to become mainstream, to begin to impact many aspects of our lives in a truly ubiquitous and meaningful way.

AI: Over 65 Years In The Making

The concept of AI is not new. In fact, it stretches back to 1950 when early computing pioneer Alan Turing famously posed the question “Can Machines Think?” and it would be another 6 years, in 1956, before the term “artificial intelligence” was first used.

So it has taken nearly 70 years for the right combination of factors to come together to move AI from concept to an increasingly ubiquitous reality. And there are three innovation trends driving its acceleration and adoption right now.

The first is Big Data. The explosion of Internet-connected devices, sensors and objects has expanded exponentially the amount of data the world is now producing. In this increasingly digital era, data is the “new oil”– a source of value and sustainable competitive advantage.

The second factor is ubiquitous and powerful Cloud computing. Today, anyone with an idea and a credit card can access the same computing power that, traditionally, only global multinationals or governments have possessed. Cloud computing is democratizing technology and accelerating innovation on a global scale.

The third factor driving AI capabilities is breakthroughs in software algorithms and Machine Learning that can identify sophisticated patterns implicit within the data itself. If data is the new oil, Machine Learning is, perhaps, the new combustion engine.

So, it is this combination of powerful industry trends, all maturing at the same time, that is accelerating – and democratizing – AI today.

AI Everywhere

Industry experts refer to the way in which AI will impact our lives as an “invisible revolution”. This refers to its ubiquity. AI will be everywhere—powering your online recommendation engine, acting as a virtual assistant chatbot for your bank account or travel agent, personalizing your newsfeed or guarding your credit card against fraud. AI will be more pervasive – and yet less invasive – than any previous technology revolution.

In particular, AI will be embedded seamlessly into existing, well-established products and services to enhance their capabilities. For example, with a small piece of AI tech called Microsoft Presentation Translator, anyone can help overcome any language barriers as PowerPoint can show real-time subtitles in more than 60 languages, simultaneously as they speak, during their presentations.

In business, AI will be used by most companies for at least some part of the value chain either in research and development, design, logistics, manufacturing, servicing or customer engagement. In fact, leading IT industry analyst IDC believes that by next year, 40% of digital transformation initiatives globally will be supported by AI capabilities[1].

And you do not need to be a start-up or hi-tech company to embrace the possibilities of AI, just have the vision and commitment to make it happen. Take, for example, Mitsubishi Fuso Truck and Bus Corporation (MFTBC), an 85-year-old Japanese auto manufacturer, which has given itself just two years to become a “100% digital operation” – complete with cloud-based capabilities in AI, the Internet of Things (IoT), and Mixed Reality (MR).

One of the initiatives they have recently implemented is an AI-powered chatbot where all its 10,000 employees can access information and assistance they need in a faster, more intuitive and reliable way. This significantly reduces the time employees spend on learning the Intranet site navigation, searching for information or calling each other for help. The company is now planning to extend chatbot technology to boost customer services, productivity, and maintenance across the whole company.

AI in 2018

As we stand at the cusp of the new year, there are four key AI developments happening over the next 12 months:

Mass adoption of AI starts from 2018: AI adoption is set to soar in 2018 and beyond when organizations start to see clear benefits being reaped by AI innovators such as MFTBC. IDC forecast that worldwide AI revenues will surge past US$46 billion in 2020[2]. Closer to home, AI investment in Asia Pacific is predicted to grow to US$6.9 billion by 2021, expanding rapidly by 73% (CAGR)

Ubiquitous Virtual Assistants: We will begin to see the adoption of broad-scale AI in the form of conversational AI chatbots in both consumer and business scenarios. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2020 more than 85% of customer interactions with the enterprise will be managed without a human interaction and AI will be the key technology deployed for customer service[3].

Democratizing data and decision-making: In a world where more data exists than ever before, the ability to deliver meaningful business insights from that data to the maximum number of relevant employees becomes of paramount importance. AI will be the key technology for making that happen by bringing together data from employees, business apps, and the world.

Building trusted foundations for AI: There will be increasingly more discussions at governmental and industrial levels to create formal governance and regulations in the usage of AI. We saw these discussions with the onset of eCommerce and the advent of cloud technologies. It is critical for transparent public-private conversations to take place as they will shape how AI can benefit economies and societies in a fair, transparent and trusted way.

The future of AI burns brightly and 2018 is the year that will establish a solid foundation for the mass adoption of this exciting and vital technology.

References

[1] IDC Reveals Worldwide Digital Transformation Predictions, Nov 2017

[2] IDC, Worldwide Spending on Cognitive and Artificial Intelligence Systems Forecast to Reach $12.5 Billion This Year, According to New IDC Spending Guide, April 2017

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2011/09/27/customers-dont-want-to-talk-to-you-either/#ff504bc70dcd

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Microsoft, Ateneo, & ATRIEV host hackathon for the visually-impaired

The internet is a very important aspect of our life, as our most common source of information and entertainment, and means of connecting with peers and loved ones. However, most websites are not designed to be used by those with visual impairment, making much of the web inaccessible to those with vision loss.

This is the problem that Adaptive Technology for the Rehabilitation, Integration, and Empowerment of the Visually Impaired (ATRIEV) sought to address when it partnered with Microsoft to host its first-ever hackathon last September 9-10 at Ateneo de Manila University. Dubbed “Hack a Site, Hack a Sight”, the event sought to promote web accessibility for all by recreating local, service-oriented websites to comply with the standards of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

“Hack a Site, Hack a Sight is very much in line with our mission of providing inclusive and accessible technology to everyone. We’re extremely happy to be part of a project where bright young minds from different perspectives can collaborate and explore the possibilities of accessible technology,” said Bertrand Launay, Managing Director of Microsoft Philippines.

The hackathon was attended by visually-impaired (VI) students from ATRIEV as well as sighted students from other participating schools across Metro Manila. VI students teamed up with their sighted counterparts to re-create a website with the focus on improving web accessibility.

The 18 teams identified the accessibility bottlenecks in the website, and aimed to address several accessibility concerns when they re-created their respective websites. These involved determining whether websites were responsive or mobile compatible, and the specific issues that prevented VI users from accessing these sites.

The young “hackers” then incorporated accessibility features to address each accessibility issue, taking steps to improve the overall user experience of the website. Some teams utilized voice/speech programs like Microsoft’s own API to improve accessibility.

“This hackathon for the blind with the blind truly demonstrated what the word “inclusive” is all about” says Tony Llanes, ATRIEV’s Executive Director. “It showed that both the sighted and the sightless can take advantage of the technology using universal design”.

For some developers, Hack a Site, Hack a Sight was an eye opener. Prior to the event, they had no idea of, or gave very little importance to web accessibility.

“There’s this whole angle of accessibility that was never really considered before. One thing I found really interesting was getting to work with the visually-impaired, and see their perspective on what the internet is to them. There is this whole other side that you need to consider when you make a website,” said Deion Tristan Cosgayon Menor, a 3rd-year Computer Science major at Ateneo de Manila University.

“At Microsoft, we are steadfast in our commitment to providing technology with the best accessibility features in conformance with global standards,” said Launay. “Through technology, we can truly empower everyone to achieve more.”

Through the Coding for Accessibility project, a Microsoft YouthSpark Program, the partnership aims to cultivate computer science skills among young people with visual impairment by providing a platform to grow IT skills sets and getting access to the latest technology tools and resources.

To learn more about the Coding for Accessibility project, click this link: : https://news.microsoft.com/en-ph/2016/08/17/microsoft-youthspark-program-creates-computer-science-training-opportunities-for-blind-and-low-vision-filipino-youth/

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