Position Statements

The following position statements were submitted to the W3C Workshop on Inclusive Design for Immersive Web Standards:

Key areas to make XR truly inclusive of people with disabilities

Meredith Ringel Morris, Research Manager of the Ability Team at Microsoft Research

Present and future challenges of incorporating captioned and signed instruction into XR platforms

Wendy A. Dannels, research faculty in the Center on Access Technology

Understanding XR Accessibility User Needs & Requirements (Oct 2019)

Joshue O Connor Emerging Web Technology Specialist (WAI/W3C)

Expressions of interests

Workshop goals

The registered participants identified the following goals for the workshops:

• Better and more comprehensive understanding of A11y and its implementation apis
• • Identifying practical ways in which all attendees can impact the inclusiveness of XR Defining common terms, threats, and practices around inclusiveness that attendees can agree on and use to improve communication
  • Establish a call to action which drives attendees to act on what they learned within this session.
• Focus on specific features that are lacking
• Defining a roadmap and milestones to measure success and leverage experimentation within the W3C network, find volunteers and collaborators to build small experiments post-workshop to curate an ongoing conversation, so we have something to show and tell in the next workshop.
• Documenting existing knowledge, practices and experience relevant to the goals of the workshop; developing a deeper understanding of the interrelations among emerging standards that can be used to create XR and immersive Web experiences; and clarifying user requirements for inclusion, together with opportunities for meeting them through standards-based approaches. Identification of concrete technical approaches that could be better supported in Web standards would be particularly valuable as a contribution to current Research Questions Task Force and Accessible Platform Architectures Working Group efforts.
• Actionable and demonstrable implementations of success criteria for XR
• Practical next steps.
• Perhaps producing a list of areas or open questions where user research is needed would be valuable, especially if it could become a living a document where research results could be posted.
• I am most interested in the prospects for captioning, interpretation and translation in XR.
• Outlining work to be done in order to create/retool technologies to make WebXR accessible.
• Case scenarios where inclusive XR is applied on the web and its impact
• Precise location-based auditory experiences (more precise location than GPS)
• good goal would be to end the two days of the workshop with a rough best practices document listing ways to incorporate inclusive design for WebXR that covers a broad range of use-cases/form factors informed by the range of experiences from participants in the workshop.
• The workshop should focus on actionable things we can do individually and collectively to make more accessible experiences.
• Finding where the gaps are, see what is already available that can help, or see what can be implemented Roadmap to how inclusive design can become integral to the development of the immersive web, whether this is structured workshops, a lived experience advisory panel or some other collaboration between developers and people using the immersive web
• • Establishing goals for development of use cases and user requirements
  • Establishing near-term goals for standards support
  • Establishing a plan for medium and longer-term architecture to support an inclusive immersive web
• A rough draft of a best practices document for web app framework writers who want to make accessibility features the default.
• 1. How navigation could be made better for low - vision individuals with XR.
  2. Best practices to make accessible immersive experience for everyone.
  3. Any way through which XR could be used in making world more inclusive.
li<>Continued effort to make certain that for any unique/innovative work, accessibility and usability are built-in and not added on at some later date.
• helping bringing communities of stakeholders together for open discussion/sharing is needed.
• I'm familiar with WCAG standards. At the workshop, I expect we'll want to consider how we can shape existing web standards to suit emerging XR technologies. I'm also hoping the workshop considers accessibility as a component of ethical XR implementation. Technology has the potential to expand opportunities for people with disabilities, but it can just as easily perpetuate barriers if it's not made accessible. Moreover, technology is not inherently good simply because it exists. We have to be critical about the ways we're developing technology and careful about how we encourage people to use it. This is especially important when integrating AI tools like computer vision, which can start infringing upon user's privacy if left unchecked.
• Since Inclusive Design is about "putting people first", I am more interested in hearing various thoughts/experiences from people with disabilities.
• Accessibility and implementation of inclusive design principles.
• The ability to create a template or a workflow that I could bring back to my university to share with others.
• a shared understanding of this space
• I think the core goal of the workshop should be to establish a set of standard practices and structures in web XR frameworks and APIs to enable accessibility hook-ins to any future applications that may arise. To expand on this objective, I do not believe we have yet discovered how to make XR content fully accessible but this workshop is a crucial time to learn from the adaptations that had to be made to prior technologies such that at this time we can be confident in what areas of XR technology need to remain open and modular enough for future solutions to be integrated without complete overhauls to the infrastructure. A secondary goal of this workshop should be to establish ongoing collaboration to perform feasibility assessments of different technological solutions in a universally agreed-upon format such that future solutions can function seamlessly across different platforms and frameworks.
• • To recognize existing problems with Immersive Web.
  • To etermine policies and priorities for making Immersive Web inclusive
  • To share opinions not only from Inclusive experts but also from the side who normally creates content such as VR
• I would like to come out of this workshop with a strong foundation of the current state of accessibility in the XR space.
• identify near-term and long term goals for current implementations and standards
• I'd like to leave with a deep understanding of the tech stacks, different and related WGs and CGs, and how we can help each other
• I'd love to congregate and summarize existing solutions to xr accessibility and use those as springboards for new ideas. Areas I'm particularly interested in and can provide value are design strategies for visually impaired and motion-sickness prone populations. I'd also love to see a talk started about accessibility standards for XR and work/network with others so this extends past a 2-day workshop.
• How should we as digital accessibility advocates outline requirements and best practices for AI and XR to fully engage all users including those that rely on assistive technologies. Networking with others in the digital a11y space to build awareness and understanding of these technologies and their impact on accessibility & equal access to digital content and experiences
• To have a better understanding of accessibility in this area
• I think they should talk about designs while thinking about XR and AI technology .like what should you consider and what you should not,the good and bad aspects etc
• A case study to demo a process - according to one's role, Designer, PM, developer. Look at it going into a project and reviewing "We are building a web site. What needs to considered. Addressing code and a cheat sheet hand out. Sample checklist. I realize a lot of this is on the W3C site.
• • Providing ample discussion and hands-on time to evaluate ideas and current solutions
  • Actionable takeaways that can form the basis of recommendations and product decisions for platforms and apps that exist today
  • Setting next steps that participants can follow to continue the conversation and moving accessibility standards forward as they related to the immersive web
• Overcoming the visual aspects of virtual and augmented reality to make them accessible to those that can't rely on their vision to interpret the world.
• I think the main focus should be on inclusion itself – an invitation and path to participation from individuals with varying and intersectional functional needs as well as domain knowledge in any of the areas where technology and human factors meet. Other goals would then be to: identify some of those individuals; draft an invitation; review the work to date; draft design principles; discuss external environmental and contextual hazards and constraints.
• contribute to the “Checkpoints for XR Accessibility” in the Xaur Draft. Establish and draft a set of higher level design principles, such as “Do no harm.” Most important is identification of people and the landscape of work being done.
• Developing standards and guidelines.
• Gap analysis... where are the gaps in knowledge/standards to enable development of accessible and inclusive XR. Road map, including needed resources to fill the gap(s).
• I think the workshop should focus on creating a list of priorities that members from industry and academia should focus on to improve the accessibility of virtual and augmentative reality systems and applications for the web. A priority list will help focus conversations on what issues are currently solvable but are not widely implemented, as well as issues that require more research to understand how to address.
• Sharing standards that apply to multiple team roles, including design, development, and content.
• It would be nice to have a combination of both hardware and software challenges and solutions -- that is, things that would need to be solved on a platform level and also things software developers can do when creating apps for existing hardware. I'd also be personally interested in the possibilities for using XR (or more specifically AR) to address real-world accessibility concerns -- for example, face recognition in AR could help someone with face blindness, or blurring/dimming areas with a lot of movement could maybe help with overstimulation.
• 1. Get different perspectives from a wide range of stakeholders
  2. Group the topics (limited number) for more focused discussions
  3. Consolidate and summarize for the report
  4. Conclude with clear next steps
• Metadata, standards integration, future of content distribution & media networks in WebXR, state of the content/media accessibility, areas to work on and test, alignments for 2020 R&D
• • Defining the current and future audiences that are/will be stakeholders in the industry (age groups, minority groups, level of ability, comfort with technology, technology use case and industry).
  • Define some safety guidelines that designers and product developers can follow.
  • Define some anti-patterns that lead to inaccessibility and bad UX.
• The power of collaborative design (developers working directly with the population in need).