ONE more comment after the Microsoft Ability Summit.

RantWoman is unclear that the world needs one more gosh-danged comment about the recent Microsoft #abilitysummit. The world is getting another post anyway.

RantWoman has chatted with a couple people she saw there and there are in fact ideas simmering but elaborating them would be too much like work for the Sunday after someone RantWoman knows took her first #fremontsolsticeparade naked bicyclist ride.

RantWoman's head is also full of other "makes head explode" topics such as tariffs, nuclear posturing in NE Asia, kidnapping the children of people applying for asylum, attempts to cut SNAP benefits in the new farm bill....

All of this is why RantWoman is going to rattle on about people with disabilities in the workplace.

Some of the time, in the experience of many around RantWoman,  there is only one person who uses accessibility tools in an office. This places a burden on the person with disabilities and their tech support staff to network and connect to all the different pieces of mental lint sometimes needed to make accessibility tools play well with a specific environment. RantWoman kind of hopes that the wave of thought about accessibility over the last 10 years has helped ease the burden on both sides. RantWoman hopes this, but is not taking bets.

Alternately, some of the time, workplaces around RantWoman are likely to be peopled both by someone who uses Toby the new eye blink control mechanism and someone who relies on screen readers. That is Toby will be of no use to people in the second category, but they will need to collaborate. So it would excite RantWoman to see demo which show people with different disabilities using different accessibility pathways as they collaborate.

And one more thing just for the put EVERYONE to work crowd: sometimes people need the tool to figure out what they can do for work. RantWoman has a neighbor who MIGHT be able to use Toby. RantWoman's neighbor is interested in watching movies on the internet. RantWoman's neighbor can speak about 10 words in an hour; at the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing, she uses her words to tell the people helping her find her videos what kind of video she would like to watch. MAYBE she can get to enough Toby skills to find her own videos or still further to find videos and use a word search program to type reviews, emails.... MAYBE,. But that is a LONG way from her being in any world where RantWoman can see work outcomes! Better quality of life? Probably, but not work outcomes. Just sayin...