Thread Subject: Re: Second Life

Note

This archival content is maintained by WebAIM and NCDAE on behalf of TEITAC and the U.S. Access Board . Additional details on the updates to section 508 and section 255 can be found at the Access Board web site.

From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Thu, Aug 02 2007 8:55 AM

Will,

I don't think anyone is disputing the potential, and powerful
applications of virtual environments, but in the context of 508 the big
question for me is whether the technology is ready for specific mention
and standards. It seems that we have a few options:

A) come up with specific requirements for virtual and simulated 3D
enviromnents (relates strongly to whether the access technologies are
ready)
B) rely on the standards that reference the need to expose programmatic
information about UI objects to help address needs of blind users and
other standards to support other user populations and be explicit that
this type of application is not exempt
C) punt the issue to "equivalent facilitation" for this version and hope
that the industry matures by 2011 when we do this again.

Maybe there's other options, but part of me wonders if this isn't going
to be solved in a reasonably comprehensive way anytime soon and if we're
being too optimistically aggressive on this topic.

AWK



> -----Original Message-----
> From: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
> [mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ] On Behalf
> Of Will Pearson
> Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2007 2:43 AM
> To: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
> Subject: [teitac-websoftware] Second Life
>
> Hi,
>
> Mike Paciello suggested that I contribute to the discussion
> on Second Life.
>
> I suspect that quite a few of you already know me but for
> those of you who don't I'll give a quick introduction. I'm
> Will Pearson, a blind guy from the UK. I've got something of
> a track record in the field of accessibility:
> I spent a while working as a contractor for Freedom cientific
> on advanced user interface research, I now act as a
> consultant for another screen reader vendor, I've worked with
> several big name software companies, such as Microsoft, on
> making some of their products more accessible, and, more
> recently, I've started to work for Mike at TPG; however, most
> of my time these days is spent looking into collaboration,
> virtual reality, and haptics as part of my PhD in the
> Computer Science department at the University of Bristol.
> Whilst accessibility is not the area of my PhD, given my
> previous and current work in accessibility and my research
> into collaboration and virtual reality I do have an interest
> in making virtual environments more accessible.
>
> At the moment virtual environments do not exclude everyone
> who has a disability. If we take Second Life as an example
> then there are a number of videos on websites such as YouTube
> that contain interviews with disabled users of Second Life,
> and particularly people who have mobility problems.
> The reason why Second Life and other virtual environment
> systems seem to be relatively popular amongst disabled users
> who can use them seems to be that they can perform activities
> in virtual environment systems that they cannot perform in
> the real world; so, for some at least virtual reality
> actually seems to be more accessible than the real world. A
> second reason, although not exclusive to virtual
> environments, seems to be that people who have a disability
> can meet up with others who have a disability in a colocated
> virtual reality system. Often, this is quite difficult to do
> in real life given the relatively low numbers of people who
> have a disability and thus the likely low density of people
> with a disability in a given geographic region. Second Life
> actually contains clubs and other buildings, such as
> Wheelies, that are run by people who have a disability to
> serve as a focal point for disabled users of Second Life.
>
> The benefits that virtual reality can bring to groups who
> have other types of disability is also quite significant.
> Taking the blind as an example, as it's a group that I have
> the most experience of, then several benefits come to mind.
> Often people learn about objects in the world from looking at
> pictures in books and watching pictures on TV. Pictures are
> very useful as they avoid the ambiguity, lack of precision,
> memory limitations, and cognitive workload that is often
> associated with natural language. Blind people often touch
> physical objects to gain details of their shape, spatial
> relationships to other objects, etc and this delivers the
> same information as pictures do and also avoids the problems
> of natural language. There are several problems with
> touching real world objects: quite a lot are too big to touch
> them in their entirety and quite a lot are located signficant
> distances away from the person who wants to investigate them.
> To get around these problems models of the objects are often
> used in place of the real object; however, because models are
> physical objects in their own right they are difficult to
> share, store, transport and they can suffer damage. One
> emerging technology is haptics, which is a technology that
> can allow someone to touch simulated objects, and consumer
> orientated haptic devices are now starting to appear on the
> market, such as the Novint Falcon. Combining haptics with
> virtual reality would give a solution where any object could
> be modelled and that model could be shared with anyone in the
> world. Objects that are far away, such as the moon, could be
> modelled, objects that are too small to touch, such as the
> double helix structure of DNA, could be scaled up, and
> objects that are too big, such as the space shuttle, could be
> scaled down. This could go a long way to improving the
> education of blind people in certain subjects. One other
> possible use is in mobility training. The information given
> by long canes and guide dogs can be considered to be a set of
> forces. haptic devices can simulate forces, and so virtual
> long canes and virtual guide dogs can be simulated. This
> could allow people to explore environments that they plan to
> visit before they visit them, whcih is likely to improve
> their confidence when they visit that environment in the real
> world. Whilst not all of the information found in the real
> world can be delivered through haptics or virtual reality the
> amount of information that can does give it some interesting
> applications.
>
> So, I think that people with disabilities can benefit from
> virtual reality technology beyond the benefits that virtual
> reality generally offers.
> Therefore, the question is not whether people should be using
> virtual reality but how do we best make it accessible to
> those who currently cannot access it.
>
> Will
>
>

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