Accessibility Feature Implementation Within Free VR Experiences

Abstract

Virtual reality (VR) enables many exciting, immersive experiences; however, those experiences are sometimes inaccessible. Researchers have explored methods to improve VR accessibility, but it is also important to ensure that we have a clear understanding of the prevalence of current accessibility feature implementation to identify what support is less common for different impairments (e.g., vision, motor, hearing). In our small-scale study, we focused on free VR experiences since everybody can install those apps and games without any cost.We inspected 106 free VR experiences available for the Meta Quest 2 so that we could determine if relevant accessibility features were available for the modes of interaction present, as well as the overall prevalence of accessibility features across the sample of VR experiences. We found that 36.8% of our sample did not include any accessibility features, and many other VR experiences could have benefited from additional accessibility features. We make recommendations that can help to ensure future VR experiences are implemented with more accessibility in mind.