NSF Convergence Accelerator Track H: Making Virtual Reality Meetings Accessible to Knowledge Workers with Visual Impairments

Virtual reality (VR) promises to be a widespread technology in the coming years, but it is completely inaccessible to people with visual impairments. One of the main advantages of VR is that it emulates real-life interactions where people walk around and talk to one another using naturalistic nonverbal behavior. Meanwhile, remote work has become commonplace due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Employers, researchers, and workers alike are expressing the need for VR workplaces, where they can more easily brainstorm and hold discussions with others. However, while researchers and practitioners have proposed some methods for improving VR accessibility, no one has explored how interpersonal communication in VR can be made more accessible. While a blind person can hear someone speak, she misses out on onverbal cues like proximity, gestures (waves, nods), and gaze. This proposal aims to investigate how such nonverbal cues can be made accessible to improve the overall accessibility of VR to support knowledge workers with visual impairments. The overarching goal of the project is to develop user-centered, evidence-based guidelines that stipulate how VR can be made accessible to knowledge workers with visual impairments. The investigators will focus on remote work use cases, where interpersonal communication and accessible shared materials play central roles. Following user-centered design, they will conduct focus groups with knowledge workers with visual impairments to identify key use cases and needs. Then they will design low-fidelity prototypes to explore accessible features. They will evaluate these prototypes with target users and develop a preliminary set of guidelines. If funded for Phase 2, they will iterate on the initial prototypes and rigorously evaluate them in controlled studies. In addition, they will refine the guidelines and work to incorporate them into existing accessibility standards. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.