XR Access
Symposium
2019 Report
OVERVIEW
In 2019, I had the opportunity to participate in the first ever XR Access Symposium. I worked within the Sensation & Cognition team with a variety of industry professionals to brainstorm ways in which to make augmented and virtual realities accessible. Find the full report HERE or explore the XR Access website HERE. The following are the notes I took while working on the Sensation & Cognition team.
RESEARCH QUESTION
How can we create technologies that are accessible to people with sensory or cognitive differences?
OUR VISION
To make meaningful and equivalent experiences for users that employs and maximizes (provides flexibility for ) all five senses and modalities of input by developing a set of explicit standards to accommodate difference in sensation & cognition.
ANTICIPATED CHALLENGES
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Explicit intent has to happen in making VR accessible, otherwise it’s exclusionary.
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The rush to produce so it can be the first to market.
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The assumption that XR is available to everyone (i.e. it’s expensive).
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Developers are likely to assume that their product is intrinsically visual, they might not know what senses are necessary to complete certain tasks.
VALUES & PRINCIPLES
Every VR app has an intro that lets the user decide who they want to receive their information. The default standard should include auditory, visual, and haptic.
Being transparent about the things that work and don't, being explicit about what key features are available (and not). Interaction configuration at the beginning once you open up the box, and the option to skip is available and done knowingly. As you are going through a tutorial, you could be customizing your optimal experience.
Provide options to the user on how they want to receive their information. First provide a default configuration but allow a simple solution for users to customize their experience.
1 - 3 years
Engaging the different senses. Work on building the understanding of VR/AR developers so that they better understand multisensory experiences, and that they must consider more than one sensation to drive their development.
1.0 Guidelines may suggest “Lack of one sense does not exclude the user from the XR experience...System output must address more than one of the following senses: speech, sound, taste, smell, touch.”
SHORT TERM GOALS
LONG TERM GOALS
4-10 years
Provide the know-how for XR Accessibility and make it available to developers. Build meaning into how those senses are used.
Engage with multisensory learners, developers, designers who are creating V/A experiences. Raise awareness that accessibility for VR/AR exists through social media campaigns. Bring developers to industry conferences and engaging with companies individually.
This can include developing a curriculum by providing introductory training (someone at these events who walks them through the challenges and solutions that already exist in the XR community, similar to a hackathon).
FINAL NOTES
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We want to maximize the way we learn and our senses through VR.
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We need to make sure our XR platform works with different strategies that individuals have already learned in terms of getting information.
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More research should be done to find out about what features are essential to people with cognitive disabilities.
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There is a lack of guidelines that instruct you how to interact with VR. This is where VR avatars could become helpful, by handholding you until you achieve a certain level of understanding. Create an introductory phase before the actual VR game, and as you are going through a tutorial, you could be customizing your optimal experience.