Learning To Design Virtual Reality For Accessibility
When Southern Rehab approached us to ask about researching how a player on the higher end of the disability scale would be able to handle such a game, we jumped at the chance to collect real user feedback as the design progressed.
Physical barriers were the first we needed to tackle. The Daydream controller’s design, with its simple three degrees of freedom, immediately makes the game more accessible for people with limited movement in the arms and hands especially. In that sense the hardware gave us the foundation to build the design on.
This then forced us to focus on the simplest way to control gameplay and move around within the game. This has required us to make some compromises to the traditional “big room” movement the wider public have come to expect of VR gameplay. In our game the player moves by clicking on a ground spot to move there. Similarly, clicking the controller left or right enables them to turn . This opened full body movement using just one hand with the controller through the environment. We felt the trade-off was worth it, if it meant the experience could be more widely accessible.
One tester who was a wheelchair user explained she suffered regularly from motion sickness when driving. She had played some VR and had experienced motion sickness there as well. So we looked at how the in-game movement was cognitively processed, compared to the experience of moving in the real-world, and made sure she wouldn’t get motion sickness.
We also looked at the sensory issues for a player on the autism spectrum to see if the VR audio triggered anxiety in the same way as real-world audio does.
It’s all too easy for us as developers to design for the world we are accustomed to living in, in the way we are used to experiencing it. It takes effort to go beyond that. We believe it’s worth it. Audiences will benefit and VR itself will benefit.
See the full story here: https://uploadvr.com/accessibility-vr-design/