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"The Guide Has Your Back": Exploring How Sighted Guides Can Enhance Accessibility in Social Virtual Reality for Blind and Low Vision People

Jazmin Collins, Crescentia Jung, Yeonju Jang, Danielle Montour, Andrea Stevenson Won, Shiri Azenkot

TL;DR

A framework based on physical sighted guidance that enables a guide to support a blind or low vision user with navigation and visual interpretation and highlights opportunities for novel guidance abilities in VR, such as dynamically altering an inaccessible environment.

Abstract

As social VR applications grow in popularity, blind and low vision users encounter continued accessibility barriers. Yet social VR, which enables multiple people to engage in the same virtual space, presents a unique opportunity to allow other people to support a user's access needs. To explore this opportunity, we designed a framework based on physical sighted guidance that enables a guide to support a blind or low vision user with navigation and visual interpretation. A user can virtually hold on to their guide and move with them, while the guide can describe the environment. We studied the use of our framework with 16 blind and low vision participants and found that they had a wide range of preferences. For example, we found that participants wanted to use their guide to support social interactions and establish a human connection with a human-appearing guide. We also highlight opportunities for novel guidance abilities in VR, such as dynamically altering an inaccessible environment. Through this work, we open a novel design space for a versatile approach for making VR fully accessible.

"The Guide Has Your Back": Exploring How Sighted Guides Can Enhance Accessibility in Social Virtual Reality for Blind and Low Vision People

TL;DR

A framework based on physical sighted guidance that enables a guide to support a blind or low vision user with navigation and visual interpretation and highlights opportunities for novel guidance abilities in VR, such as dynamically altering an inaccessible environment.

Abstract

As social VR applications grow in popularity, blind and low vision users encounter continued accessibility barriers. Yet social VR, which enables multiple people to engage in the same virtual space, presents a unique opportunity to allow other people to support a user's access needs. To explore this opportunity, we designed a framework based on physical sighted guidance that enables a guide to support a blind or low vision user with navigation and visual interpretation. A user can virtually hold on to their guide and move with them, while the guide can describe the environment. We studied the use of our framework with 16 blind and low vision participants and found that they had a wide range of preferences. For example, we found that participants wanted to use their guide to support social interactions and establish a human connection with a human-appearing guide. We also highlight opportunities for novel guidance abilities in VR, such as dynamically altering an inaccessible environment. Through this work, we open a novel design space for a versatile approach for making VR fully accessible.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 30 sections, 3 figures, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Related Work
  3. Enhancing Accessibility of VR
  4. Enhancing the Accessibility of Social Virtual Worlds
  5. Visual Interpretation and Guidance in the Physical World
  6. Methods
  7. VR Guide Prototype
  8. Designing a Representative Environment
  9. Designing Guidance Scaffolds
  10. Additional Accessibility Enhancements
  11. Behavior Guidelines for the Guide
  12. Virtual Environments
  13. Participants and Recruitment
  14. Procedure
  15. Data and Analysis
  16. ...and 15 more sections

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: Screenshots of the Tutorial and Three Park Environments.
  • Figure 2: Likert Scale Responses Histogram. 1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Neither Agree nor Disagree, 4 = Agree, 5 = Strongly Agree
  • Figure 3: Characteristics of participant requests and utterances to the guide. They are normalized as the percent of the participant’s total number of requests or utterances to avoid biasing the data toward talkative participants. Left: requests fell into seven style categories seen above. Right: utterance tones included (1) utilitarian, the request purely fulfilled a need; (2) friendly, a pleasant or humorous statement; (3) respectful, polite expressions; (4) apologetic, participants apologized for actions or outcomes; (5) uncertain, they deferred to the guide or gave them authority.