ΝΕΑ

13/04/2016

Empowering people to do more through technology

In today's world, anyone can use their digital skills to make products better for people of all abilities, allowing them to do things that were once difficult or impossible for them. Chris Schlechty, a SharePoint developer at Microsoft, is a good example of this.

Schlechty thinks that, now more than ever, it’s “fascinating and wonderful” that technology can empower people of all abilities to accomplish what they want to do — and that he’s able to help advance something so important as part of his job on Microsoft’s SharePoint Experiences team.

“Technology provides that avenue to compensate in areas where something might be more difficult,” Schlechty says. “It’s really cool to be able to help to enable people.”

The software development engineer, who has muscular dystrophy and uses the onscreen keyboard and other assistive technology, and his team are modernizing SharePoint. In his core role, Schlechty is creating new pages that can be quickly updated and deployed to customers as part of a broad effort to make an even better and faster experience for users.

But as his team’s “accessibility driver” for engineering, he’s also the expert his colleagues turn to for guidance on how to design features that work well for people with various disabilities, working from the outset with other developers to build user interfaces with accessibility in mind.

To know more about Chris Schlechty' personal story and his work at Microsoft go here.