Making Mobile Augmented Reality Applications Accessible
This work addresses accessibility for blind users in AR applications, which is an incremental step in making immersive technologies more inclusive.
The paper tackled the problem of making mobile augmented reality (AR) applications accessible to blind users by identifying common tasks in AR apps and creating prototype accessible alternatives, which were evaluated with 10 blind participants and shown to enable AR use for them.
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.