I would be interested in sharing a position statement and presentation at the upcoming Inclusive XR Workshop in Seattle. I am the Research Manager of the Ability Team at Microsoft Research (http://aka.ms/msrability); my team focuses on advancing the state of the art of accessible technologies for people with disabilities, and accessible Mixed Reality has been a focus of our work for the past several years. Our Canetroller project (http://aka.ms/canetrollervideo) demonstrated how novel haptic devices combined with haptic metadata could make virtual scenes navigable by people who are blind. Our SeeingVR toolkit (http://aka.ms/seeingvrvideo) introduced techniques to make Unity applications more accessible to people with low vision. We have also been conducting foundational work on making VR accessible to people with limited mobility, including conducting user interviews to better understand the current accessibility of commercial VR technology to this group, as well as designing novel input and interaction techniques to better match users’ physical abilities.

 

Based on my team’s experiences working in this area, I feel there are five key areas that should be considered with regards to making XR truly inclusive of people with disabilities: (1) ensuring content accessibility through standards and guidelines, (2) developing accessible interaction techniques, (3) considering device/hardware accessibility, (4) allowing inclusive user representations within virtual environments, (5) creating high-quality XR content for accessibility scenarios (e.g., rehabilitation, training) in addition to ensuring that mainstream XR is accessible. These points are discussed in more detail in my team’s recent position paper available online at http://aka.ms/vraccess.

 

I would be interested in leading a discussion on these topics at the workshop, to help frame the discussions based on my team’s direct experience discussing XR accessibility with people with disabilities and prototyping novel solutions to address these issues. More information about my background is available on my website at http://aka.ms/merrie. Please let me know if you have any further questions or require additional information.