How AI is being used to improve disability employment – Microsoft Accessibility Blog – Microsoft

A pivotal step in every employment journey involves a jobseeker learning about the requirements of a potential job to assess their own interest and qualifications. Interfaces for job boards work in some situations, but what if there was a better way for candidates to learn about a position?

Zammo.ais founder and CEO, Alex Farr, is encouraged that customers like Seattle Airport and OurAbility are using Zammo to make information more accessible. Now, he is eager to scale that success by enabling any company with a job board and make it easy for any person with a disability to use their voice to discover and apply for jobs.

On Zammos journey to apply AI in accessibility scenarios, they met Khadija Bari, a student coordinator at VISIONS Services for the Blind. She opened a whole new avenue of thought with a powerful question: Im visually impaired. With [Zammos] voice platform now, I just need to talk to my home assistant, and I can get the information I need to help the participants that I serve. We do it with so many other products, why not start doing it with jobs?

That question led Zammo to explore how their solution could benefit the recruitment industry. Zammos intention is to learn from their previous insights, research and ultimately to produce accessible interfaces for various online job boards, enabling people with disabilities to get informational details about positions, align their skills, and complete an application easily. This project will leverage Natural Language Processing and Voice to create an interface that will give customers the ability to browse semi-structured data on various job search websites. Zammos platform combines Azure Bot Service, Azure Communication Service, Azure Cognitive Search, and leveraging newly released Azure Semantic Search to provide better search results given its understanding of the linguistic content of search terms.

To ensure their end solution addresses the real need of people with disabilities, Zammo is partnering with Open Inclusion, an inclusive insight, design and innovation consultancy. They help organizations unlock value by asking, understanding, and considering the needs of people who move, sense, think or feel differently. Zammos project matches Open Inclusions purpose making the world more inclusive and leveraging technology to solve current needs by reducing frictions in new ways.

See more here:

How AI is being used to improve disability employment - Microsoft Accessibility Blog - Microsoft