Design
Accessibility
When leveraged correctly, immersive platforms offer super powers for accessibility.
People of different abilities can feel present with others, enjoy haptics and immersive sound, move easily through virtual spaces, or read live captions of conversations. Spatial technology can even offer sight correction for those with only partial vision loss or conditions like farsightedness.
It’s also important to remember that disabilities aren’t always permanent—they can be temporary or situational. For example, if you happen to break your arm, you might still want to play an immersive game with friends while you heal. Accessibility solutions are not as mature for immersive experiences as they are for 2D devices, but that presents an enormous opportunity for designers and developers to innovate.
This design guidance will continue to be expanded and updated over time. For detailed developer guidelines on accessibility, see our VRC content. You can also review the XRA’S Developers Guide, Chapter Three: Accessibility & Inclusive Design in Immersive Experiences.
There are five disability groups: vision, hearing, speech, motor, and cognition. You’ll see these icons on each section to indicate the groups they affect.
Principles
Consider these principles to help build immersive experiences that are accessible for everyone.
Include people with disabilities in research, design, and development
Consider people with disabilities from the very start of the design process. Including diverse groups of people with disabilities is essential to make sure that everyone can take control of their experience and engage safely.
People need to be able to set their accessibility preferences early on so they can complete all other actions in a way that works for them. Ensure everyone can access and use an app or experience without assistance.
Add value for people with disabilities
People with and without disabilities are already using immersive experiences for therapeutic purposes and to do things that are challenging or impossible for them in the physical world. When designing, consider how to create new value for people with disabilities in addition to removing barriers.
Inputs and interactions
Controllers, voice commands, and physical gestures are all ways to interact with immersive experiences. While optimizing inputs and interactions not only improves the experience for those with disabilities, it creates a clearer and more comfortable user experience for everyone.
Best practices
- Keep the controller scheme simple.
- Reduce required button presses.
- Let people set up and save preferences early on.
Physical actions
- Provide optional remapping of controls on the controller for left and right hands, including for use with only a single controller.
- Offer remapping controls onto alternate controllers, sensors or keyboards.
- Let people use the experience in a seated, reclining or stationary position.
- Let people select targets with head gaze and other inputs where possible.
- Include voice assistance. (Consider ways to use Voice SDK and wit.ai.)
Visual and touch elements
- Use button highlights to represent controller inputs.
- Provide sounds and haptic feedback.
Hit targets and scaling
Hit targets ensure that people can accurately interact with their experience, like pressing virtual buttons. Extra cushion is required in immersive experiences to account for variance in the size, dexterity and movement of people’s hands and bodies.
For example, this could include completely multiplying an input, such as scaling the position of the controller by twice the distance so that the avatar can fully extend its arms, even if the person is only able to achieve half-arm extension in real life.
Best practices
- Comfortably-sized hit targets should be a minimum of 22mm x 22mm / 48dp x 48dp / 3˚FOV at 0.42m. This sizing allows enough space for a user’s finger and accounts for hand tracking movements.
- Add invisible hitslop (the additional space surrounding a UI element that will still trigger an action when touched) to meet or exceed 48 dp if an interactive element is smaller than 48 dp.
- Visual targets can be smaller than their hit targets, but, the smaller the visual target, the more difficult users will perceive hitting it to be. Visual targets should be at least 32 dp x 32 dp.
- When interfaces require a range of motion or hand dexterity to perform input actions, make sure there’s the ability to exaggerate or enlarge the input.
Do’s and don’ts
DO add invisible hitslop to meet or exceed 48 dp if needed.
DON'T create hit targets smaller than 48 dp.
Assistive technology
Assistive technology includes any hardware devices or software features designed to support users with disabilities. Such tools are a major area of opportunity to make immersive experiences usable for everyone, as they’re often more complex than 2D experiences and industry resources are in their infancy. Focus on developing fundamental tools, such as captions and screen reader support, tailored to the unique aspects of spatial design.
Best practices
- Support third-party integrations and devices when possible.
- Aim to provide the tools available on 2D devices, like captions, while accounting for the unique considerations of immersive experiences.
Captions for immersive experiences
Do you prefer to always watch TV with captions? You’re in the majority if so. Captions offer a true curb-cut effect, as they benefit users beyond the disability cohorts they were intended for, improving comprehension, focus, retention, and information processing for all. Many people rely on captioning to understand audio through text, while others use it to better process the information around them, regardless of hearing ability.
This is especially critical for immersive experiences, where spatial audio cues people on where to look and who is speaking. The captioning needs are unique from other devices, so designers and engineers must innovate solutions that often do not yet exist. Below are best practices established so far, which will continue to be updated. Recommendations are still being developed and implemented for captions in immersive experiences across the industry.
Placement
- Start with captions at about half the distance of the far-field or 1 meter away, but give people the option to move them.
- Try options like leashing captions to head movement, ensuring people don’t need to move in an uncomfortable way to read or feel increased nausea.
- Captions should be an overlay that’s visible at all times and never obstructed by spatial elements.
- Try placing captions at the top or bottom of their 40-degree field of view (FOV). Pick a placement that’s best to avoid obscuring tasks.
- Do not attach captions to the personal UI. If needed, gradually shift them above or below so they don’t obstruct the view of the UI or roomscale elements.
DO place captions at about half the distance of the far-field or 1 meter away, but give people the option to move them.
DON'T place captions too far back.
DO place captions where they won't obscure tasks.
DON'T obstruct a user's task or important information.
Speed
- Sync captions as closely to real-time audio as possible.
- Allow pauses to give readers a break.
- Either display the words in unison with the dialogue or display complete sentences as they are spoken.
- Make sure the sentences are provided in easily understood blocks, such as 2-3 sentences at a time.
- When a new line is added, all previous captions should “roll up” so that the new line is visible within the FOV. This animation should last approximately 0.5s and use an ease-out animation curve.
- If there’s a pause between two pieces of speech, the gap must be a minimum of 1 second, preferably 1.5 seconds. Anything shorter produces a jerky effect. Try to not use gaps if the time can be used for text.
- A new line should be added after 1.5 seconds has transpired without speech and there is new text to display.
Attribution
- Make sure captions clearly indicate who is speaking. Typically, captioning more than 4 people is too confusing and not recommended.
- Depending on the experience, consider a line break in the captions for each new speaker.
- Consider garbling or ignoring audio from speakers with whom the user is not in conversation.
- Use visual cues to direct people towards the source of sound or event. However, consider whether cues may cause confusion when in a crowd or large group setting. Let the user know when someone is trying to get their attention, but avoid overwhelming them with unwanted cues.
Do’s and don’ts
DO provide speaker attribution.
DON'T make the user guess who is speaking.
General requirements
- In social experiences, ensure other users are aware of or can consent to their audio being captioned (required by states and other locales with wiretapping laws).
- Provide several fonts, colors, and 3+ settings for text size (50%, 75%, 100%, 150% and 200% the default size), using 10% of the screen size (i.e., FOV) as a baseline. Line and row height should scale appropriately.
- Provide a background box to visually separate captions from the environment and avatars behind it.
- Display a maximum of 32 characters per row and 2 rows of text.
- Words should wrap to the next row and not hyphenate. Words that already contain a hyphen may wrap mid-word.
Additional resources
For additional guidance on general caption design, you can review the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2.
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