This article highlights 11 recommendations to make VR more accessible for people who are blind. Currently there are a lot of accessibility barriers that prevent blind people from interacting with VR environments. VR Designers should work to create 3D spaces and controllers that are more adaptable so that the level of input can be toggled based on the individual’s needs.
Currently there are a lot of accessibility barriers that prevent blind people from interacting with VR environments.
Uhh… Yeah. Virtually moving around a non-physical location with only audio cues has to be ridiculously difficult. For sighted people, vr adds another level of immersion. For blind people, it will add another level of abstraction.
And given that nearly all of the controller bindings are taken up by different descriptions, this still leaves nearly every other vr environment inaccessible to blind people.
100% agree. This is why adding short but descriptive audio prompts for everything is very important. In this example they forget to add an audio prompt for when an object is grabbed, which immediately became an accessibility barrier. In addition, creating an intuitive way to navigate the audio prompts similar to screen reader navigation is needed.