Making Mobile Augmented Reality Applications Accessible

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how to make mobile augmented reality applications accessible to blind users by identifying key tasks, creating prototypes, and evaluating them with blind participants, providing a foundation for accessible AR development.

Contribution

It identifies core AR tasks requiring accessible alternatives, develops prototypes for these tasks, and evaluates them with blind users, advancing accessible AR research.

Findings

Prototypes enable blind users to access AR content.

Participants found the accessible prototypes usable and informative.

The study offers insights and a roadmap for future accessible AR development.

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) technology creates new immersive experiences in entertainment, games, education, retail, and social media. AR content is often primarily visual and it is challenging to enable access to it non-visually due to the mix of virtual and real-world content. In this paper, we identify common constituent tasks in AR by analyzing existing mobile AR applications for iOS, and characterize the design space of tasks that require accessible alternatives. For each of the major task categories, we create prototype accessible alternatives that we evaluate in a study with 10 blind participants to explore their perceptions of accessible AR. Our study demonstrates that these prototypes make AR possible to use for blind users and reveals a number of insights to move forward. We believe our work sets forth not only exemplars for developers to create accessible AR applications, but also a roadmap for future research to make AR comprehensively accessible.