XR Accessibility: for people with thinking disabilities
Posted on by Joe Lamyman in Design and development
Extended Reality (XR) experiences tend to focus on providing rich, visual content to convey information. But we need to consider how we convey the information in these experiences in a way that isn’t overwhelming, scary, or difficult to understand.
In this post, we’ll explore considerations for designing and developing inclusive XR experiences for people with thinking disabilities.
If you haven't already, you can also explore other articles in this series including:
- Introduction to XR accessibility
- XR Accessibility: for people with seeing disabilities
- XR Accessibility: for people with hearing disabilities
You can also watch my Introduction to XR accessibility talk from InclusiveDesign 24 (#ID24).
Who does this affect?
People with thinking disabilities might include:
- People who have Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
- People who have dementia
- People with anxiety
- People who are recovering from an operation or illness
As we discussed in Introduction to XR accessibility, disabilities might be permanent, temporary, or situational. Regardless, we need to create experiences that are usable for everyone.
Muting non-critical information
People with thinking disabilities may need to personalise XR experiences in different ways.
The W3C’s XR accessibility user requirements includes a requirement related to personalisation. Requirement 4.3 Immersive personalization states that:
Users with cognitive and learning disabilities may need to personalize the immersive experience in various ways.
This is then broken down in to two user requirements, with one of them being:
Allow the user to turn off or 'mute' non-critical environmental content such as animations, visual or audio content, or non-critical messaging.
The requirement is quite broad, but we can break it down into a few different areas. It could cover animations, environmental, visual, and audio content. Outside those areas, it might also apply to non-critical messaging and notifications.
As an example, imagine a virtual reality (VR) experience where people put on a headset to use an experience. This can feel overwhelming by itself. Once inside, people might find themselves in a busy, detailed environment with animations for the surroundings or noisy people walking by. If these details aren't important, people might feel distracted or overwhelmed making it difficult for people to continue to use the experience.
Personalisation can be used as a way of managing these layers of information. Personalisation helps people control the environment remove non-critical information that may be distracting.
When designing and building your experience, try to think about the content as layers. Start with a concept of what the critical information is. This could be key narration or virtual objects that the user has to interact with. Once you know this, ensure that there is a way for the user to experience just this content. Once you have your core experience, you can layer non-critical information on top of it. Add this content in a way that it can be muted or turned off if it is not helpful for people.
To implement this, people should be able to update their preferences at any time. This could be done through the experience's settings menu. This is because people might set their preferences when first using the experience, but these may change over time. As people become more familiar, they might want less help for example. It might also be that due to the environment that people are in, that they want to update their settings for that period of use.
This does not stop you from creating rich worlds with animations or audio. Instead, it's about making sure that people can tailor their experience. This allows people to get just the information they need, so that the experience is usable.
Understanding the objective
It’s also important that people are able to clearly understand their objectives. The experience might allow people to freely investigate the virtual environment. Alternatively, maybe there are tasks that people need to complete. Whatever the aim, people should be able to easily find this information. A user story for this need might be:
As someone with a short-term memory impairment, I want to know the tasks that I need to complete, so that I can use the XR experience.
To achieve this, you should inform people what their objectives are and provide guidance about how interactions work. This way, people who need additional information, can still use the experience.
Depending on the experience, you can tie in the functionality in different ways. As an example, if your experience has characters, these could remind the player of their current task. Or in educational or training experiences, a clear, easily visible objective might be more appropriate.
When designing this functionality, be mindful of the requirements covered in the previous blog post in this series, for people with seeing disabilities, including:
- Design content bearing in mind that people may be zoomed in and loose context
- Ensure that text content can be personalised to make the display easily readable
- Design affordances in a multi-modal way, so that as many people as possible can access the information
Where possible, give people a choice, so they can complete actions in multiple ways. This allows people to use alternative methods of input, which may be more usable for them.
As a last resort, it should be possible to skip tasks so that people can continue to use the experience. This is useful in situations where people are unable to complete a task because it is too complex or the cognitive load too high. Instead of preventing people from using the experience, they can bypass the problem. However, this depends on the context of use, and may not be possible in experiences that relate to training or certification.
Safe spaces
The Barriers Browser research by the BBC, identifies accessibility barriers found in immersive environments experienced by disabled people. One of the cognitive barriers identified is “Expectation”. The team found that if experiences break people’s expectations, either in the way that it displays or represents content, it can lead to people feeling unsafe.
Expectations are centred around the way that people will expect something to work based on their own lived experiences. In XR, breaking expectations might include unexpected sounds, shadows, bodily representation like hands and legs, or placing people into an unfamiliar simulated situation which feels unsafe, for example underwater or in a confined space. Any differences from the way in which people expect things to behave, or that differ from their experiences, may break expectations and pose a barrier.
In Jamie + Lion’s fantastic talk on the Barriers Browser research, Jamie explains a few situations in which expectations of virtual environments, changed how people used them.
In one example, people encountered a cobbled path in the virtual environment and did not want to navigate the path due to their experiences with cobbled paths in the physical world. People’s expectations changed their behaviour. Experiences in the physical environment shaped their perception of the virtual space.
Jamie shared another takeaway about why someone was forced to leave an experience. A participant with a learning impairment slowly became comfortable wearing the VR headset. Over time, they were able to wear it for longer periods. During this process, the research team reassured the participant, telling them the VR experience was virtual and couldn't cause harm. Once the participant was comfortable using the VR, a team member handed them a controller. However, this moment broke the user's expectations. In the virtual space, the controller seemed to fly toward them, while in reality, they felt it bump into them. This broke the user's expectations, as they believed nothing in the virtual world would affect the physical world.
This experience highlights the concerns that people may have when using XR experiences. Immersive experiences provided in VR can be uncomfortable, overwhelming, and scary. This is partly because people's entire view is filled with the VR content and people are placed in environments that they are not used to.
Additionally, people might not be familiar with characters and objects in virtual spaces. Therefore, provide a way for people to quickly exit an XR experience. It’s not enough to rely on people being able to remove a headset. This is because people may not be able to do this independently, or quickly. Instead, provide a way for people to navigate to a safe space in the virtual environment. This space should remove all models and characters. It should be a quiet room, or a user-set location in the current environment, in which they previously felt comfortable in.
When designing this, make sure that people are aware of how they can navigate to the safe space. People need to be able to activate this functionality quickly, for example with:
- A key press (for example Escape)
- A gesture
- A voice command
Devices like the Meta Quest 3 VR headset, provide a home environment as part of the operating system. These spaces are included with the headset, which can be used as a safe space. Ensure that the devices you are designing for have this functionality, and if not, make sure that you provide it.
Summary
XR allows people to experience immersive environments. However, these immersive environments must be created in a way that includes the needs of disabled people.
By designing experiences with clear objectives, the ability to turn off non-critical information, and safe spaces, we can create inclusive and usable XR experiences that can be used by as many people as possible.
More information
- Inclusive XR: accessible augmented reality experiences, Joe Lamyman
- Inclusive XR: accessible 3D experiences, by Joe Lamyman
- Barriers Browser, BBC
- XR Access Speaker Series | Jamie + Lion, Jamie + Lion
- XR accessibility user requirements, W3C
Next steps
If you're currently designing an XR product, our design review service will provide you with our accessibility expertise and guidance to build an accessible experience. If you already have an XR product, our assessments can help you to understand whether your product meets accessibility standards.