“It’s Just Part of Me:” Understanding Avatar Diversity and Self-presentation of People with Disabilities in Social Virtual Reality

Abstract

In social Virtual Reality (VR), users are embodied in avatars and interact with other users in a face-to-face manner using avatars as the medium. With the advent of social VR, people with disabilities (PWD) have shown an increasing presence on this new social media. With their unique disability identity, it is not clear how PWD perceive their avatars and whether and how they prefer to disclose their disability when presenting themselves in social VR. We fill this gap by exploring PWD's avatar perception and disability disclosure preferences in social VR. Our study involved two steps. We first conducted a systematic review of fifteen popular social VR applications to evaluate their avatar diversity and accessibility support. We then conducted an in-depth interview study with 19 participants who had different disabilities to understand their avatar experiences. Our research revealed a number of disability disclosure preferences and strategies adopted by PWD (e.g., reflect selective disabilities, present a capable self). We also identified several challenges faced by PWD during their avatar customization process. We discuss the design implications to promote avatar accessibility and diversity for future social VR platforms. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Virtual reality; Accessibility technologies.

Towards Inclusive Avatars: Disability Representation in Avatar Platforms

“…Choosing from these categories and choosing which parts of identity to highlight or hide often depends on context [8,23,53]. For example, in video games, people are encouraged to express themselves in any way, even if it doesn't align with their physical-world appearance; thus, visibly disabled people often choose to present as nondisabled [15,20,55]. On the other hand, in text messages or social media posts, people prefer to closely couple their real life and avatar appearances [18,55].…”

“…For example, in video games, people are encouraged to express themselves in any way, even if it doesn't align with their physical-world appearance; thus, visibly disabled people often choose to present as nondisabled [15,20,55]. On the other hand, in text messages or social media posts, people prefer to closely couple their real life and avatar appearances [18,55]. The intended audience of the online persona can further affect choices around presenting oneself (and one's identities), such as work colleagues versus friends [16].…”

“…A few social apps also provide assistive technology representation in their avatars. For example, Meta avatars, Memojis, and Bitmojis each allow users to show a hearing aid or cochlear implant [55] on the avatar, while Meta and Bitmoji also support wheelchairs in their avatar stickers.…”

“…Disability representation, especially outside of video games, is conspicuously absent from existing literature [44]. One exception is Zhang et al's work, which focuses on how and why BLV and DHH people represent their disabilities in VR spaces [55]. They found that many people use assistive technologies to visually signify their disabilities in avatars.…”

“…While prior work has studied how people portray and describe disability and other identity characteristics in pictures or stock photos [5,28], as well as other identities like gender in video game contexts [41,43,49], people with disabilities are often left out of avatar research [44]. One recent work focuses on blind or low vision (BLV) and d/Deaf or Hard of Hearing (DHH) people's experiences with avatars in VR [55], but more research is needed to understand how those findings extend to social applications more broadly and with other disabilities, including invisible disabilities. We investigate how people with disabilities express and want to express their disabled identities digitally with avatars.…”