You can read Microsoft’s promotional comments from Panos Panay, EVP, Chief Product Officer, Windows + Devices, at this website: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2022/09/20/available-today-the-windows-11-2022-update/ You can read How inclusion drives innovation in Windows 11 at this website: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2022/09/20/how-inclusion-drives-innovation-in-windows-11/ Presenter Contact Info Email: [email protected] The following information about Jeff Bishop can be found on the How inclusion drives innovation in Windows 11 website posted above: Jeff Bishop is the product manager driving Narrator, the built-in screen reader in Windows. Jeff has been blind since birth and has dedicated his career to building experiences that empower people who are blind. And over the past few years, Jeff has led the way in making Narrator easier and more delightful to use. As he tells it: As a screen reader user myself, I truly understood the need for some changes to Narrator’s voice. Listening to that voice all day while working, reading an article or book, or just surfing the web on the sofa – it needs to be a delightful experience. To develop the new natural sounding voices for Narrator – “Aria,” “Guy” and “Jenny” – we had to figure out what made a voice “great” for a screen reader user. I spent considerable time with our engineering team to improve responsiveness and other characteristics of the voices, and we tested and gathered tons of feedback to ensure they met my needs as a user and for the needs of all screen reader users around the world. Drawing on his own lived experience and feedback from the community, Jeff helped bring new natural sounding voices to Narrator. These new voices use state-of-the-art text-to-speech that more closely mirror natural speech, making everything from browsing the web to reading and authoring documents more enjoyable for users who listen to their screens rather than looking at them.

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