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

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Collins, Jazmin, Jung, Crescentia, Jang, Yeonju, Montour, Danielle, Won, Andrea Stevenson, Azenkot, Shiri
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Collins, Jazmin
Jung, Crescentia
Jang, Yeonju
Montour, Danielle
Won, Andrea Stevenson
Azenkot, Shiri
author_facet Collins, Jazmin
Jung, Crescentia
Jang, Yeonju
Montour, Danielle
Won, Andrea Stevenson
Azenkot, Shiri
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_21659
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle "The Guide Has Your Back": Exploring How Sighted Guides Can Enhance Accessibility in Social Virtual Reality for Blind and Low Vision People
Collins, Jazmin
Jung, Crescentia
Jang, Yeonju
Montour, Danielle
Won, Andrea Stevenson
Azenkot, Shiri
Human-Computer Interaction
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.
title "The Guide Has Your Back": Exploring How Sighted Guides Can Enhance Accessibility in Social Virtual Reality for Blind and Low Vision People
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.21659