"The Guide Has Your Back": Exploring How Sighted Guides Can Enhance Accessibility in Social Virtual Reality for Blind and Low Vision People

TL;DR

This paper presents a framework where sighted guides support blind and low vision users in social VR, enabling navigation and visual interpretation to improve accessibility and social interaction.

Contribution

It introduces a novel guidance framework based on physical sighted guidance adapted for social VR, addressing accessibility barriers for visually impaired users.

Findings

Participants valued social interaction and human connection with guides.

The framework supports diverse user preferences and needs.

Opportunities for dynamic environment modification in VR were identified.

Abstract

As social VR applications grow in popularity, blind and low vision users encounter continued accessibility barriers. Yet social VR, which enables multiple people to engage in the same virtual space, presents a unique opportunity to allow other people to support a user's access needs. To explore this opportunity, we designed a framework based on physical sighted guidance that enables a guide to support a blind or low vision user with navigation and visual interpretation. A user can virtually hold on to their guide and move with them, while the guide can describe the environment. We studied the use of our framework with 16 blind and low vision participants and found that they had a wide range of preferences. For example, we found that participants wanted to use their guide to support social interactions and establish a human connection with a human-appearing guide. We also highlight opportunities for novel guidance abilities in VR, such as dynamically altering an inaccessible environment. Through this work, we open a novel design space for a versatile approach for making VR fully accessible.