Designing Accessible VR Experiences
A Panel on VR Accessibility and 3D Virtual Tour in Mozilla Hubs
Designing Accessible VR Experiences
A Panel on VR Accessibility and 3D Virtual Tour in Mozilla Hubs
This MozFest experience is both a panel discussion and an open Social VR 3D world built in Mozilla Hubs. The Hubs exhibit will be available for you to drop in on at any point throughout the festival and beyond. The panel discussion takes place at 9:00am PST / 18:00 UTC on March 8th. Register for MozFest and sign up to attend the panel!
Panel Discussion
The Panel Discussion will feature 3 guest speakers:
Dr. Mar Gonzalez Franco, Principal Accessible Mixed Reality researcher at Microsoft’s Extended Perception Interaction and Cognition Lab (EPIC) whose Locomotion Vault content is featured in the Hubs Motion Room
Dylan Fox, part of the Coordination and Engagement team for XR Access, an organization dedicated to making virtual and augmented reality accessible to people with disabilities. He also works as a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, studying how AR can help people with low vision navigate real-world obstacles.
J. Stephen Lee, a designer and educator with a background in branding, motion, interactive, and experience design. Stephen is an assistant professor in the Graphic Design program at Portland State University.
From the varied perspectives of Research, Community Activism, and Virtual Education, we will discuss what it means to create accessible virtual spaces.
Hubs Experience
TLDR
The Hubs Experience showcases various accessibility techniques, innovations, considerations, and best practices in VR. In addition, it encourages collaboration and contribution of ideas that will further VR accessibility in the future.
Please note you do not need to register for the session to view the Hubs experience. The hubs rooms are open to all and accessible via the links below. Each room is limited to 24 participants at a time due to bandwidth constraints, but additional rooms can be cloned if the primary links below are full.
Links
Room Links
- Home - This is the starting point for the experience and will lead to the individual rooms.
- Movement
- UI
- Audio
- Controls
- App Design - Coming Soon
- Testing - Coming Soon
Clone Links
How You Can Make This Experience Better
Do you have great ideas / research / skills in 3D, Design, Hubs?
This is a passion project that is being built in my (currently very limited) time, and I would love the help of anyone who feels passionate about spreading the word about VR accessibility or building accessible Social 3D spaces.
Some ideas for ways you can participate:
- research of novel advancements in accessibility
- designed content / documents / videos that we could actually place into the VR experience
- activities or creative ideas that will make each room a less passive / more collaborative experience
- 3d modeling / texturing / lighting help
- audio narration / sound effects
- testing and accessibility improvements within the experience itself.
- Getting feedback from online accessibility communities
- Speaking, guiding groups through the virtual space, participating in discussions, or acting as virtual support / Q+A staff
Please get in touch if you would like to help.
You can also file issues in this repo, view discussions or start a discussion.
Acknowledgments
I set out on this project knowing little about VR Accessibility or Mozilla Hubs. Through the help of a great many folks, some of whom I may be forgetting here, I have learned a ton, and if you take the time to learn more about these people’s work, I’m certain you will as well. In addition to the amazing panelists mentioned above:
LeeAhnn Victorio - Designer whose feedback on the accessibility issues within my own Hubs experience was priceless. She helped bring the UI room specifically into a better state.
Thomas Logan, Equal Entry - Excellent resources on this and other Accessibility topics. His feedback was incredibly valuable, and unfortunately his timezone made it impossible for him to be on the panel, but make sure to check out some of his meetups in Hubs!
Nicole Shadowen and Heather McGeachy, who cued me in to some great research and are constantly looking for ways to make Mozilla’s work more inclusive.
The entire Hubs team (as well as the DPX Hubs folks), especially Elgin-Skye McLaren, the Hubs Community Manager, who ceaselessly works to connect with and learn from everyone in the greater community to make Hubs an inclusive space. She was the start of all of this!