Voices of VR Podcast:
Hello everyone, I'm Kent Pye, welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. This podcast focuses on the future of spatial computing. You can support this podcast on patreon.com/voiceofvr. Today's episode is actually a compilation of presentations from the XR Access Conference in Shanghai. Usually at conferences, you see more mature research paper presentations, while poster presentations showcase emerging research. So the poster presentations provide a good overview of the cutting-edge developments in the field of accessible XR. I had short conversations with six different people: Spandita, Ria, Lucy, Denise, Sue, and Nicholas. I will be presenting these conversations one after the other, and I will also share some concluding remarks. So in today's Voices of VR podcast, we will listen to the interviews with Spandita, Ria, Lucy, Denise, Sue, and Nicholas. The interviews were conducted on June 15, 2023 at the XR Access Conference in New York. Now let's get started. I'm Spandita, a user experience researcher, and my work focuses on accessibility. I'm conducting research at the Ability Project at New York University with Professor Regine Gilbert. We are trying to create a set of heuristic guidelines specifically for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to integrate accessibility when building immersive experiences. Currently, there are many guidelines available, but they are not being used correctly for various reasons. So we are trying to bridge that gap by conducting usability tests with people with disabilities and interviewing designers and developers to understand the gaps in their development processes and how to integrate accessibility. We are identifying issues from usability tests and trying to answer the question: How can we eliminate these issues in the development or design process? This is an ongoing study and we are open to collaboration.