SBGames + SIBGRAPI + SVR 2021 | Keynote - Reginé Gilbert
good afternoon everyone i'm happy to welcome today the audience from all our collocated conferences SVR - symposium on virtual and augmented reality Sibgrapi - conference on graphics patterns and images and SBGames - Brazilian symposium on computer games and digital entertainment I'm glad to introduce you to our keynote speaker today Reginé Gilbert. Reginé is a user experience designer educator international public speaker with over 10 years of experience working with technology she has a strong belief in making the world a more accessible place one that starts and ends with the user. Her areas of research focus are digital accessibility, inclusive design, and immersive experience and she's the author of the book "Inclusive design for a digital world: designing with accessibility in mind". Today Reginé is going to talk to us about Accessibility XR and I hope you all can benefit from her views on the subject regardless of the field you work and research. Please, to those following the conference as attendees, make some questions in our dedicated Discord channel. And if you are following us on YouTube you can add your questions in the chat of the video and Reginé can answer them at the end of her talk.
Okay so without further ado I will pass the word to Reginé Gilbert Thank you Victor and thank you to everyone attending and all the folks behind the scenes who work really really hard on putting on this conference. I'm really happy to be here with you today to talk about XR accessibility so I'm going to share my screen a line that we have all used these past 18 months very often. and... wonderful so uh thank you all again for being here I'm going to be talking to you about XR accessibility and uh I just want to start off with the difference between accessibility and inclusion. Accessible design focuses on the outcome or end result of a design project inclusive design is closely related to accessibility but rather than an outcome it's a methodology for how to approach design it's a process for creating a design that can be used by a diverse group of people this quote is from Cameron Chapman and on this slide I have an image of a person who's in a wheelchair, a person with one arm, a person with a broken leg, a person with a prosthetic, and a person who has a seeing eye dog with a white cane. I have an image here of four icons of bodies with one that is darker than the rest. It's a purple color and the others are orange.
with the world moving towards a digital age every day, we need to focus on how these new technologies can be used by everyone. The reason why I have this image of four with one that is standing out is because in the United States where I'm located one in four people have a disability and there are over a billion people in the world who have a disability and that number increases as people age. One thing I want to point out is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines has four areas of focus which are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust and although VR does not have general guidelines that are out there I think these are good to reference perceivable focuses on the area of vision and hearing. For vision there is an eye with an icon slash through it,
for hearing there's an ear icon with a slash through it, for operable there's motor there's a icon of a hand holding a cell phone, for understandable it points to cognition there is an icon of a head with a question mark inside of it, and for robust it refers to cognition and motor. So perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust meaning that if I am using anything that's on the web I can perceive it whether I have vision or I don't, whether I have hearing or I don't. Operable meaning motor, can I use something whether I have hands or not. In cognition, can I understand it regardless of what my condition may be. And robust meaning can I understand it and also can I use it. So I have some ongoing research. Over the summer of 2021 we (Assad, Mahmoud, and I) started documenting what design patterns are currently being used in the industry.
We examined how they are performing with respect to accessibility and inclusivity and how they can be improved. We specifically focus on using a Quest 2 and I have an image here of a person who is using VR with gaming and newspaper and videos surrounding them. So I have an image here of a young black man in a colorful colored shirt and blue pants seated in a wheelchair next to a white Tesla with back passenger side falcon wing door open motioning towards the spacious interior which could very easily be utilized to make a wheelchair accessible vehicle with an in-floor ramp. I'm showing this example because I think it's important to understand that cars such as Tesla which is quite advanced has not incorporated accessibility features into it. So there's accessibility
and inclusivity challenges that we see out in the world and certainly in VR. The current challenges are that accessibility options are often an afterthought. In most cases there's no real focus on accessibility options there's very little awareness for challenges faced by users and there's limited development tools available for smaller companies So part of what we did this past summer and, you know, unfortunately due to the pandemic we were limited in our ability to work with others because of the fact that COVID is still around and so we were working on this ourselves. So we looked at five titles: Beat Saber, which user navigates through an obstacle course with emphasis on song being played; Waltz of the wizard where user goes through a maze of different challenges to progress through a story; We also played Rec Room, a collection of user made rooms that a person can join and interact with other people; The epic roller coaster is where a user sits through various different rollercoaster rides; Bait which is a fishing simulator and echo VR, where the user plays with other players and a unique sport in space.
So what we learned that there are common issues present in most titles the type of accessibility options that are offered are limited. Issues with accessibility options varied and I'll get into that in a moment. So other issues were physical reactions, psychological reactions, and barriers to entry and widespread adoption. So there were very few accessibility options just in general for the titles that we went through which we chose a few paid and a few free. There was lack of extensive tutorials and some titles.
A little flexibility for different play styles, meaning that a lot of things had to be done standing up only and not sitting down. And not friendly for smaller spaces. So I live in Brooklyn, New York. Some of you may not know about New York apartments but they are not big and so a lot of these experiences are not friendly for smaller spaces and the same for Assad.
Some common accessibility options: hand tracking, playing while sitting, playing with one hand, haptic feedback, subtitles, room scale, or stationary guardian, and different locomotion options. So with hand tracking, it doesn't allow full control that a user might have when using a controller. Playing while sitting is a limited movement. When trying to play while sitting and inability to rotate. Haptic feedback, feedback is not accurate to what is happening in the experience and usage of generic feedback for most motions. And different locomotion options, some
options might cause issues for the user such as motion sickness. So, using multiple accessibility options in most cases does not work properly with the titles that we went through. And this was, from Assad's perspective, this is a barrier for entry. For the prices listed here are in um US dollars and then rupees so the Quest 2 goes for 299 and 50 000 rupees, the VIVE Pro goes for 799 dollars and 132 000 rupees and then the Valve Index goes for 999 and 165 000 rupees. This is more than what people make in a year in India and so thinking about this, this is a huge barrier for entry when it comes to inclusion and getting more folks involved in this space.
So our goals is future technologies should be accessible to everyone. It is imperative to consider accessibility for future design and development guidelines in order to provide a more inclusive experience. Improving accessibility is a part of this. So, provide better tools to the user so they can
use VR regardless of their physical or mental challenges, invest in hardware that allows people to experience VR, implement guidelines and regulations for digital products with respect to accessibility, and create a benchmark that can be used to analyze the accessibility of an experience. So providing better tools to the user so they can use VR regardless of... Sorry. That is a duplicate slide. So our goal to improve accessibility is: invest in hardware that allows people to experience VR, provide alternative controllers, provide alternative hardware that makes it easier for someone to experience VR if they are having difficulty moving. I have an example that happened today I have a new grad assistant working with me this semester who has a large hair. I meant to put a photo of this in the slide but, you know, ran out of time because I... She was
trying VR for the very first time and the headset wasn't really fitting properly and I said "well, what are we going to do?". I said this is a perfect example of when things are not inclusive from a hardware perspective. So implementing guidelines and regulations for digital products with respect to accessibility. Most other industries have guidelines and regulations related
to accessibility such as commercial instruction construction and... the web! The web has guidelines! And VR... where are they? So this needs to be something that we all can agree upon and have something similar for virtual reality.
So, creating a benchmark that can be used to analyze accessibility of an experience, we don't really have that today. Give an accessibility score potentially or/and more information regarding accessibility options to the user before they make their purchase because some people will purchase something, a game, and then they can't play it oftentimes. So "the best way to predict the future is to invent it". This quote is from Alan Kay and, you know, everyone here has the potential to do really great things. So I have an image here that says "design, test, and improve". So how can we further improve our
understanding of issues involving VR? From my research perspective, that's: More titles, so given the limited time which we had over the summer, we could only try a few titles. So my hope is to try more. And now that we can actually have more human subjects involved, I want to get more folks with disabilities to actually use VR. The second thing is to use different hardware. The project was conducted only using a single headset, the Quest 2. And the third thing as I said earlier is involve more people.
So documenting experiences of other people would give a deeper insight into more issues. Did you all know that 97.81% of the world hasn't tried VR yet? This is from Pablo Cardenas who did a talk at the a11y VR meetup and this was actually the title of his talk. So 97.81% of the world hasn't tried VR yet
which means an opportunity! Because accessibility has been missing in action. XR and VR is being used in artificial intelligence, assistive technology, business retail, communications, education, empathy, entertainment, recreation events, gaming, health, rehabilitation, meetings, navigation, therapy, training, video programming, virtual assistants, and wayfinding, and other things, right? The military is a huge user of VR technology. So things to consider when we're creating experiences or working on experiences or designing experiences are: what is this experience like without visuals? without sound? one-handed? no-handed? seated? standing? with voice or using a switch controller? And our opportunities are vast. We can improve communication, improve customization, improve avatars, improve navigation, and improve interfaces.
So in 2017, Alice Wong, a disability activist and founder of the disability visibility project found in research conducted in partnership with Lucasfilm's immersive entertainment studio that people with a variety of disabilities, from blindness to cerebral palsy to autism, enjoy using VR and believe it could be beneficial, but experience major accessibility issues. The inability to customize experience and the necessity of moving certain parts of the body were two of the biggest issues raised by survey respondents. Ian Hamilton, who is an accessibility advocate, big on gaming accessibility, says that "thinking about accessibility equals inspiration" and "thinking about accessibility late equals remediation" so it's imperative that we start to think about accessibility and inclusion from the very beginning of whatever it is we're working on, research, development, design, uh whatever it may be. So I want to talk now about accessible XR and give some uh examples. So this is improving
accessibility of an interactive 3d environment with a screen reader and spatial audio cues from Zohar Gan. So I'm going to play a video, I hope everyone can hear it. So here it goes... Zohar: "an application with a 3d environment running inside a web page technically a canvas with WebAssembly code" "the application can generate and provide the web page with semantic description of itself" "following a request from the user while the user moves inside application they" "get updates by the screen-reader about what is right in front of them in the 3d environment as" "they walk inside it. Technically using aria-live = polite." System: "block. destination." Sytem: "obstacle" Zohar: "in order to support competitive games the default semantic excel data doesn't include" "any object's detailed locations at all. that's the default behavior that was demonstrated." "In other non-competitive 3d applications, educational training, social VR apps, etc." "the developer might want to provide more semantic data for their users" "here's an example of exporting detailed semantic data" System: "obstacle 11 meters" System: "block 17 meters" System: "destination 18 meters" System: "destination 9 meters, destination six meters" Zohar: "now let's close the screen-reader" "and enable JavaScript based spatial audio. We will be able to hear the"
"audio cues with headphones where we rotate clockwise in the 3d environment" System: "block block block block block destination" System: "block block destination" Zohar: "so JavaScript code on the page took the semantic free description" "and turned it into spatial audio" I have another video. This is improving accessibility of a video of an interactive 3d environment The same environment from the demo I just showed, doing it using spatial audio cues for the objects that appear in the video. Zohar: "now what about people watching the video of this" "application, either as live stream or as a recorded video? let's move to pre-recorded" "video of this specific application. let's mute the video, play it and listen carefully. clock block System: "block block block" System: "block block block block block destination" System: "block block block destination" Zohar: "this demonstrates spatial audio scanning of the objects inside the video" "using exactly the same code that was used for the interactive application. So every video that" "would include the semantic excel metadata could potentially be made more accessible that way" And this is visual augmentation using semantic scene description of a video and a photo of the real world. The demo shows how a user interacts with specific objects inside the video. The video shows two coffee mugs on a wide plate which is being rotated at its center.
Video: "visual augmentation based on understanding of the scene, like here, a demo shows a home" "video on a web page and near it a graphical shape that is dragged from the web page and then behind" "specific objects in the video itself. Here it is highlighting the closest element in the scene" "the same interaction can be done with images. for example moving a graphical shape the same" "graphical shape behind only a specific object in the image. this opens up opportunities for visual"
"augmentation for people with low vision. in the spirit of soul for fun extend to many this also" "opens up a lot of creative opportunities for web experiences to scan across media types" So I want to show you, next, a really cool thing it's called WalkinVR. Some of you may or may not be familiar with it. This is a video of WalkinVR. It's... I'll discuss a little bit more after the video here. Video: "virtual reality can be an amazing thing. it gives people the opportunity to experience things they" "wouldn't otherwise be able to, like flying or traveling through space, as well as more" "down-to-earth activities, such as getting a good workout. it's not quite so easy for everyone though." "with virtual reality or VR we use real-world movements to control your actions in the virtual world."
"This is a big part of what makes it so immersive. but what happens when your real world" "movements are limited as a result of disability? it means that some VR games and experiences" "are simply not an option for you. for example the game may require you to turn around. if you use a" "wheelchair, that's not so easy. some disabilities mean you can't grip things firmly, so you may not" "be able to hold the controllers at all or have problems using the buttons. thankfully there's a solution."
"WalkinVR is software that allows you to adapt a VR environment so that limitations" "in your movement don't have to mean limitations in gameplay. It works on the Steam platform and" "integrates with the SteamVR environment, meaning it can be used successfully with almost any game." "Let's look at four ways WalkinVR can adapt virtual reality. The first is a feature called"
"virtual movement. This is helpful for when you can't walk but you can move your hands and" "hold a controller. To use it you simply grab space with a button and then move or turn around. With a" "condition like spinal muscular atrophy, you might be able to hold the controllers but not maintain" "them at the height required by the game. In this situation the position adaptation feature can help."
"this allows you to adjust the position in which the controller needs to be held" "to one that's more comfortable. In the simplest case, this would mean changing the height. But there are" "more advanced options too, like using rotation or the distance the controller is from your body." "The boost feature amplifies your physical gestures. This means small movements in the" "real world translate to much larger ones in the VR environment. It can get easier to pick up or throw" "virtual items. This can be particularly helpful if you have a limited range of hand or arm movements." "Another feature is the ability to set different parameters for each hand. This can be helpful where"
"one hand or arm is weaker than the other. For those that have had a stroke, say, this feature means you" "can compensate for the weaker arm enabling you to bring the virtual hand up into your field of vision" "something that can have a positive psychological effect if this is more than you" "can manage in the real world. And it's not just a position you can adjust. Some people can move" "the controls well enough but have problems with buttons and other tactile aspects of gameplay."
"For these people, there is the personal assistant function. This allows another person to assist the" "disabled player using a separate game controller. They can make helpful adjustments to the avatar's" "position and also perform button presses, making gameplay easier for the disabled user."
"There's also a large group of people who have problems holding controllers. Those with some" "forms of cerebral palsy, for example. Attaching the controllers to yourself in some way can be" "uncomfortable and they can be easily dropped. By using WalkinVR in conjunction with Kinect"
"and potentially other tracking devices, you can interact with VR environments without the need for" "a controller. Indeed many games and applications can be played this way, including workout routines." "Put together, all these features means you can finally focus on the whole point of the exercise" "playing the game. Virtual reality offers a great way to have fun work out and try new" "experiences. We're so excited that we can now open these possibilities up to a wider audience."
"We very much welcome and look forward to your comments and feedback." So WalkinVR is available on Steam and it's adapting VR games for people with disabilities. WalkinVR has been tested to make VR accessible for people with cerebral palsy, spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, muscular dystrophies, spinal muscular atrophies, neuropathy and orthopedic problems. Here I have a WalkinVR logo It is a person in a wheelchair holding controllers in each hand with arm spread wide. A spatial XR which is a video meeting space. Just this year offered a live caption
so here is a tweet that says "we work in a global world which means teams are more diverse than ever" "this means a #diversity of ideas but may also lead to communication challenges" "with live translation speak in whatever way you're comfortable with your colleagues will understand." So the way that it works is, it's using AI and it's showing captions above a person's head which has had mixed reviews in terms of feedback. Mozilla Hubs, which is WebVR, as web-based 3d environment, has done a lot around accessibility. I can send a link to Victor for the world that folks can try if they're so interested. And Mozilla Hubs is open to recommendations which has been great. a11y VR... so... a11y is a numeronym for the word accessibility. There are 11 characters between the 'a' and the 'y'.
This is a monthly Meet up started by Thomas Logan, where folks will meet in Mozilla Hubs but the meetings are also available on YouTube and past events have included designing a participatory workshop with Indira Knight, Haptics for XR with Eric Vezzoli and Tim Stutts, Ideas for ally programs and XR technologies by Bill Curtis Davidson. So this is a... if folks are interested in accessibility, I highly recommend going to YouTube and putting in "a11y VR" to see some of the past talks and look forward to the upcoming talks in the coming months. Another group is a W3C. The W3C has created the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and is working on guidelines related to XR this is an ongoing project that folks are working on. But right now there is a pretty good document of guidelines around for accessibility in the XR space. XR Access is a community that I'm part of. It's part of the
reason I think I'm here. Victor is also a part of XR Access. It's a community committed to making Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Realities - XR - accessible to people with disabilities. And then there's PEAT which they have a great accessibility playbook for emerging technology initiatives. It's a blueprint for launching a successful initiative
to drive the development of accessible emerging technologies. So PEAT is in the United States and stands for the Partnership on Employment and Accessible Technologies. And then the XR Association has the XRA's developer guide. So for folks who are interested in knowing
more about accessibility and development, this is an excellent guide to reference. And there's also the Oculus Virtual Reality Check so Accessibility Virtual Reality Checks focus on audio visuals, interaction, locomotion, movement, and other aspects of accessible design which are ways to make your app more compelling to more people. And just released, this is very exciting, this happened just a couple days ago, the XR Accessibility project is now on GitHub so the XR Accessibility project is an initiative driven by the XR Association and XR Access to provide a central place for developers to find solutions for creating accessible code across various XR platforms. We were inspired by developers, key players in ensuring that this technology is accessible, who reported challenges in finding accessible code snippets.
So this features strategies, code, and tutorials to solve accessibility concerns across a wide range of platforms. An index that points to resources all over the... organized by platform. Validation of resource usability and functionality, and a contribution form for adding additional resources to the project, So these are the featured platforms. So there's AR core. AR kit, Lumin OS
Unity, Unreal, WebXR, and windows mixed reality, supported devices are Android, iOS, Magic Leap one, for Unity mini, for Unreal mini, for WebXR web browsers, and for windows mixed reality the Microsoft HoloLens, the Microsoft HoloLens 2 and the windows mixed reality headsets. So if you're interested in checking it out or contributing the XR accessibility project is open source. So if you know of resources that other developers could benefit from, please share them. I want to talk about my, some of my research that I've been working on which is looking at... because I'm looking at XR as a whole, not just virtual reality, but looking at augmented reality as well and I'm looking specifically at the areas of inclusion and accessibility. And I said: where do I start? It's so vast, there's so many things. So what I ended up doing was looking at about a little over 60 tools to see... in looking at the area specifically around cost,
because that's an inclusion issue, and accessibility from a disability lens and seeing what system requirements were and what programming languages were. So my grad assistant and I created a, it's quite a large spreadsheet of different tools, the cost, if the tools are enterprise or not, the purposes and categories for which they're used, accessibility features, if there are any, the backend programming language, the scripting language, the supported platforms, the system environments, and the features. So when after we put this all together I said what is a digestible way for folks to see this and my grad student and I came up with XR City. So this is an image of a neon sign of XR City there's an opaque subway map with stops at free game VR accessibility and AR. I have this obsession
with subway maps, so this is what we made. We ended up making a subway map, so this was back in may of this year where we looked specifically and I'll just go over the legend: gaming drawing, augmented reality, 3d frameworks, characters, prototyping, modeling, animation, a11y, which is accessibility, enterprise plan, VR - paid only, paid and free, and free - because one of the I think the biggest barriers to even getting into this space is if things cost money or not or if things require a computer that folks may not have or an operating system that folks may not have. And I just want to go back to this real quick, we looked at over 60 tools. And I, really because my interest is accessibility, there were four, four tools that even had any sort of documentation. So four out of sixty is not great when it comes to accessibility and But this is a work in progress. I know that some of these companies are working on it. I want to refer to this quote by Antionette Carroll that "everything around us has been" "designed, even systems of inequality" and I want us to think about this because so many, so much of our research, so much of our design, so much of our development, is oftentimes excluding people with disabilities and I think that we have some choices to make around this area.
So when we think about creating a more equitable future, how can we make sure that we are designing inclusive and and equitable outcomes for all no matter how big or small the decision. And I'm referring to equity-centered community design the equity-centered community design created by the creative reaction lab out of St. Louis is a unique creative problem-solving process based on equity, humility-building, integrating history and healing practices, addressing power dynamics, and co-creating with the community. So there is a phrase that's oftentimes said in the disability community "nothing about us without us" and this is oftentimes not the case when it comes to our design research and development. We often times are excluding the communities with which we're doing the work so with the equity-centered design in general there's a scenario, history, and healing because it's important to understand the context of the situation acknowledging and dismantling power constructs and this means inviting diverse co-creators, building humility and empathy, defining and assessing the topic and community needs, looking at ideation approaches a little bit differently. Rapid prototyping, and testing and learning.
So I think, you know, for those who have interest in accessibility in VR, please get involved. Begin learning more about accessibility in this space Look into organizations such as the a11y VR meetup, the W3C's work with XR, XR Access, PEAT, and the XR Association. And I'm big on moving from awareness to action. Maybe you all have learned something new today, maybe you haven't. But if you have,
how do we take this awareness and move to action? I think the first step is to start small. Define what could be, get involved in groups or organizations and celebrate the little wins. I mean I thought making my subway map was a little thing, but it was something that's kind of been helpful for a few people so I celebrate that and I can tell you in all honest, the reason that I got really interested in accessibility in VR is because I like VR a lot. I like using it and I'm somebody with what they would call an invisible disability. I have some mobility issues and so it's not something you can necessarily see and I thought I want to use this stuff as I get older and I may not be able to move as well. So this is what initially got me interested in this
and I hope that all of you can move from awareness to action. So this quote by Idowu says "when you do the things in the present that you can see," "you're shaping the future that you are yet to see." And my last question for all of you is: what will you do to make a more equitable future? I have a recommendation, this is a great book by Emily Ladau. It's called "Demystifying Disability" "what to know, what to say, and how to be an ally" So you can learn about ableism and accessibility, disability etiquette, disability in the media, and how to be an ally. So thank you, so much. If you are interested in being in contact I'm on Twitter @reg_inee my email is rg1508@nyu.edu thank you all so much for listening
Thank you Reginé for the great talk. It's really good for us, I think we have a lot of content developers here in the audience from the different areas, from the games and also people just working and researching on topics related to VR, but also on Computing Graphics, so producing those models, So I think it's very good to receive these views and those guidelines from you on how to move on. So thank you a lot. We have a couple of questions the first one comes from Anderson I was seeing it right here on the YouTube... Okay so Anderson asked if you think about the problem
in a different way, one idea would be to use especially designed virtual environments to allow anyone to experiment in VR the challenges that some people face every day in their lives, for example, sit at a table that's too high or having only one hand to manipulate objects etc. What do you think about this idea of like turning things the other way around as well I think that's great. One of the things that I think about with with accessibility because I get to coach I co-teach an assistive tech class with Gus and Gus is blind and Gus says accessibility is options all we need to do is have extra, you know, like add those options and then we're kind of we're good. I do understand that people especially like if people are on a smaller team there's a lot of pressure to just get stuff done and out but what ends up happening is a lot of rework right so if we think about accessibility from the very beginning and we offer the options um yeah and I think what I can't remember the person's name but what they said is great because it's like let's change our perspective and let's change the paradigm of how we're approaching these things Thank you. We also have another question from Renan, he says that he's working with sonified AR
aimed at visually impaired folks and a problem that he has is that the sonification needs to to sound artificial in the sense that people do not mistake them for sounds uh from the real environment because it could be confusing but they also need to sound natural in a sense that metaphors from the real world are easier to understand than just brand new ones if you have any comments on how like he could navigate this duality. yeah, I would I don't know exactly but one thing to consider is is it possible to add any sort of haptic to differentiate between the like the natural sound and the unnatural sound um because when you think about folks who may be in the blind or low vision communities who may not be like deaf uh deaf blind haptic feedback is super helpful so I don't know if that's a possibility with what you're working on but if it is that's something to look into or if it's something that is uh physical is it possible to have something that's tactile for folks to engage with Thank you. We have a couple of questions I think we still have time, so Luciana asked as well how may we propose accessibility guidelines to XR if only a small portion of the citizens are already using it? Less than 30 percent. How to start, how we as a community of developers can help? oh well I think that we need to start to have the conversation in the first place to let folks know that is even um an issue right I think that a lot of um you know because I've talked to different people not only from the US but in different countries where they say I don't really know anything about accessibility and VR what does that even mean what does accessibility in AR even look like right so I think it's one starting the conversation of you know are we doing anything for accessibility with what we're researching with what we're making um because I think everything good starts with the question and I think by just asking questions and let's start the conversations going and then let's move from that move from awareness to action I think that's the most important thing I think a lot of people are aware like a lot of people are aware that the web needs to be accessible yet we're still not fully accessible and with i think with VR and AR we have such a great opportunity especially because so many people haven't tried it yet right um and if we really want to get more people engaged with it then we're making it accessible just makes sense.
Totally. I also would have one question myself if I may. So I think for a lot of the content producers we would not disagree with the need of accessibility but at the same time we continue designing and producing content with a lack of representation and a lack of diversity even if we do like co-design or, you know, user studies and I think any time we decide to create accessibility for somebody that we do not have a contact with that's also a problem, so I would like to ask what was your experience like reaching folks with disability or these connections, or where those communities are, how you can reach them? yeah so one thing we want to get away from is designing for anybody right um in the bane of nothing about us without us, we want to include those communities in what we're doing I don't care where people live at where wherever people live there are disability communities right wherever people live there are people that are different from themselves right so if we're talking about from an inclusive perspective um so i think look outside your door you know there are people there you know for me um now that we're able to actually work with folks i'm looking to I live in Brooklyn and New York city area so looking to connect with communities the disability communities here in New York right um luckily I'm already uh involved with some and and and have friends in those communities that can kind of bridge those gaps for me but I would say reach out right like let's just start to include and again nothing about us without us you always want to involve the communities that you're working with and design with and not for Sure. And I think I do have one last question it's from Fátima. She said excellent why didn't we worried about this before is there any recent demand or greater concentration that's the reason to emerge with this topic now? well I think that if you know and this is just my opinion i don't know exactly what but I have been working um with like web accessibility uh for the last like six seven years and i have seen an increase in awareness around it and then I would say in the last year I've seen a lot more accessibility I mean I think the game the last of us came out and it became like it was one of the most accessible uh experiences out there so I think that one there's a need for it people are getting older things change with us our eyesight changes our hearing changes and I think it is something that accessibility is one of those things that um we don't you know I always like to ask the question of my students does anybody text message here is anybody text message here at this conference and if the answer is yes that means you're using something that was it was initially made for folks who are deaf right and yet it's something we can all use and i think that people are now starting to see that if we make things accessible the more people can use it the more people can use it the more money we can make you know we live in this world where that that matters right so that's that's just my opinion um but there's a lot of opportunity to get more folks uh involved you know I just feel so strongly about this. I like
to ask the question of people have you ever wanted to go somewhere and you couldn't get in and how did that make you feel because i think everybody's experienced that and it's not a good feeling right and so when we make things and people can't use them it's that feeling and why would we want to make something that makes people feel not good at the end of the day we are all human beings with feelings and you know when we're developers or designers or researchers we have some impact on that. Since we still have like a little bit of time I would take the liberty to make one more question, okay? It's from Natalia. She asked if you know about any programs or incentives for disabled people to pursue careers or studies in this area oh so if you're interested in um like uh... I feel like people are a minority in VR development but they could have such a unique perspective it's actually the next one that's that's oh any programs or incentives for disabled people to pursue careers or study this in this area um not off the top of my head however um XR access is a great resource for folks who are looking to get involved um in this area and I think there's like there's a lot more to come I realize that there are people from probably a lot of people from Brazil but from different parts of the world I am US based and I do take that into consideration from an inclusion thing that I don't know what's happening in Brazil but I know um XR access is a global uh organization, so people are from all around the world so I would look at that uh organization to to to get started to find things but now you've made you've asked the question that makes me want to find the answer so now I will and if you want to email me and we can, I can if I don't have the answer I probably know somebody who does so I'm happy to chat Perfect, thank you so much Reginé. It was a great talk, so it's great for everybody to know those
doors, those opportunities on how to start getting engaged with accessibility and start taking action, so I appreciate so much you taking the time and coming and talking to us today. Thank you all, thank you behind the scene folks and thank you all to all the attendees thank you so much. Thank you. So goodbye and I wish you all attendees from uh SVR and SBGames and Sibgrapi a great conference and I hope to see you on our next sessions.
2021-10-26 21:45
