Update 10/11: Clarified Lorenz’s job title at Amazon, as well as the scope of the Notify When Nearby feature.
Give even a fleeting cursory glance at Jessie Lorenz’s website and it’s immediately obvious she’s essentially a Jill of All Trades. It’s right there in the lede, as she paints herself as a self-described “mom, disability rights advocate, public speaker and writer, Paralympic gold medalist, and tech nerd.” What’s more, Lorenz is the former director of the Independent Living Resource Center in San Francisco and once upon a time worked with mayor Gavin Newsom’s office in addressing concerns raised with the city about Americans with Disabilities Act complaints.
For the scope of this column, Lorenz’s declaration of her tech nerdom is what most compels. Lorenz, who currently lives some 800 miles north of San Francisco in Seattle, works at Amazon as a senior accessibility specialist. In a recent interview with me, she explained her role is on what she called the “small but mighty” team focused on Alexa shopping. Her group’s purview involves “really [leaning] into features that help people shop,” which includes functionality called Notify When Nearby. Using Alexa, it can detect if a customer is near an eligible Echo device and alert them to any unread notifications by replaying a notification sound. This is especially useful for customers who may not be able to see visual alerts, like the Yellow Ring light or banners on Echo Show devices. The conceit, Lorenz told me, is not everyone is able to hear or see their device, so users have a choice of receiving audio- or visual-based indictors. It’s important to her and her charges, Lorenz said, to support myriad modalities so as to make the experience as accessible as possible.
As to Amazon’s broader ethos on accessibility, Lorenz said she’s deeply appreciative of how the tech giant is generally “ahead of regulation” when it comes to the projects being worked on and the ways in which her team considers technology. Voice-driven UIs (like Alexa) are one such example, with Lorenz telling me they exist “a little beyond” regulation at this point in time. Her team, she said, has innovated ways in which to “use the power of voice-forward interfaces to measure accessibility.” To that end, Lorenz is currently engulfed in a project spanning the entirety of the Alexa organization called the Alexa Inclusive Design Council. According to Lorenz, the Council is meant to “leverage the internal expertise throughout Amazon to create best practices in our Alexa product in places where regulation may not be touching.” These efforts include areas such as voice-driven paradigms, as well as ballyhooed, ever-burgeoning nascent technology like artificial intelligence.
“We’re often ahead of the game,” Lorenz said of Amazon’s efforts in building accessibility features. “Small changes can have a big impact.”
Lorenz characterized working on accessibility at Amazon as “awesome.” Lorenz, who’s been Blind since birth, was enthusiastic in showing me the Braille embosser in her office during our discussion, with which she said she can emboss documents and the like. Lorenz shared an anecdote about how, when people become Amazonians—the colloquial term for Amazon employees—the better you perform, the more work is bestowed to you. For Lorenz, going back to work in the office post-pandemic meant she needed to advocate for things she needed in order to meet the demands of her growing workload. One of those accommodation requests was a human reader, of which she said isn’t a big deal because, after all, Homer was Blind and wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey. Human readers, she said, aren’t necessarily unique to Blind people—hello, story time for young children—but the tech industry moves at such a brisk pace that it was “definitely an advocacy experience” for her to ask for a human reader when technology naturally assumes the role of assistant to a disabled person. Lorenz lauded the experience of having a human reader as “great” when in the office, saying she doesn’t need the person to be with her all the time; a human reader is necessary only a couple hours per week when trying to navigate “complex data sets and tables.”
“[A human reader] makes me way more productive and allows me to fly higher and take on more risks,” Lorenz said. “We have these leadership principles which guide us at Amazon, which are awesome. That experience showed me I need to insist on the highest standards for my work—and sometimes that means I need a different type of support.”
One wrinkle to Lorenz’s desire for a human reader is Amazon had no existing policy and procedure to make one happen for her. It meant she had to navigate the proverbial red tape on her own for the most part, with her telling me she was forced to “help the company think about how to provide that in-person support.” Like most tech companies, Amazon moves at breakneck speed, yet is agile enough to accommodate the individual based on their specific needs and tolerances. Lorenz marveled at how this nimbleness manifests itself in the company’s products, as she said the accessibility features align with the diversity of the disability community. Particularly when it comes to the lower price points of, say, a Fire TV Cube or Kindle Paperwhite, Amazon’s breadth and depth in regards to accessibility becomes a distinct competitive advantage.
“We can do small things behind the scenes to make huge transformative differences in people’s lives,” Lorenz said.
Lorenz fancies herself a power user of technology, saying she “loves” contemplating AI’s potential as an assistive technology because she feels so strongly about “the many ways it’s going to be able to help everyone.”
“I think about people who struggle with cognitive decline or who have psychiatric disabilities, and the power of having a conversational AI who knows things about that person,” Lorenz said of AI’s potential power. “Maybe it reminds them when to take medication or if they’re some people have trouble with spending too much time with tech. Maybe they’re the AI is giving a spending reminder saying you’ve met your spending limit. There are ways that AI is going to help us that we don’t even have our heads around. I love all the pictures that can be described by AI to me; like, I have no eyesight and I say, ‘bring on the robot vision!’ It’s been transformative for me to appreciate things like my own kids’ art and, at the same time, I’ve worked on the edge of it—we are on the edge of this amazing, transformative technology that’s gonna actually help all of us raise the bar. It’s going to be the rising tide that lifts all boats. That’s why it’s so awesome and fun to be working in this space.”
Looking towards the future, Lorenz expressed optimism. As to disability inclusion, she said society—and the tech industry—is very slowly but surely moving from “tokenism to inclusion.” On the whole, however, she did concede disability inclusion “does lag further behind” other types of social justice movements. That’s the perfect reason, she added, to be working on things like the aforementioned Alexa Inclusive Design Council, not to mention the fact that Amazon’s neighbor in Microsoft have a chief accessibility officer in Jenny Lay-Flurrie. (Flurrie is a regular recurring character driving this column’s storyline.) Even as a Paralympian athlete in goalball, Lorenz said she aspired to dream big and win gold—and she did it as the goalie during the 2008 Games in Beijing after settling for silver in Athens in 2004. (As an aside, Lorenz said goalball is the only Paralympic sport not to have an Olympic analogue. It’s very much built for, and played by, Blind athletes.)
As to her job and technology writ large, Lorenz is forging ahead. She approaches her work with the same fire and fervor that drove her as a Paralympian. She’s hellbent on ensuring everything Amazon launches is accessible to all because it signifies a “raising of the bar” for accessibility and disability inclusion not solely at Amazon, but societally as well.
“I really like the work I do and I like the team I’m on,” Lorenz said of her future goals. “I hope I can continue to build space for others at Amazon to boldly lead, especially women. I do think I’m a communicator, and I like communicating to solve complex problems. I hope I can continue to both be a spokesperson for Amazon, but also elevate our messages about accessibility to higher influential leadership levels within Amazon.”