Making Mobile Augmented Reality Applications Accessible

Abstract

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. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI); Accessibility technologies; Mixed / augmented reality.

Understanding AR Activism: An Interview Study with Creators of Augmented Reality Experiences for Social Change

“…But they did not discuss the limitations associated with platforms that disproportionally exclude people with disabilities, as AR authors and audience members. The overwhelming emphasis of AR experiences discussed by participants was visual-relying on representations with few, if any, accommodations for blind users, a fact likely related to who and what we focused on in this study [28,56,66]. These overlooked access issue suggest the need for additional diversity in the selection of interviewees, projects, and projects audiences to understand the limitations to radical imagination in its current visually-oriented form.…”

“…A second limitation of this work involves the majority of nondisabled participants chosen for this study and the corresponding challenges around centering access. Even with the best intentions and investments in discoverability, AR faces several barriers to engagement and use that greatly limit its engagement with disability justice movements and intersectional advocacy [1,28]. Creators mentioned the hurdles to participation among groups without technical know-how, awareness, or familiarity.…”

"I Shake The Package To Check If It's Mine": A Study of Package Fetching Practices and Challenges of Blind and Low Vision People in China

“…Navigation in the City/Building. Previous research has proposed multiple approaches such as sensor models, augmented reality, and information label systems to improve travel accessibility for the BLV population [12,20,21,49,50].…”

"It Feels Like Taking a Gamble": Exploring Perceptions, Practices, and Challenges of Using Makeup and Cosmetics for People with Visual Impairments

“…To enable easier object detection and information retrieval by people with visual impairments, future product design could leverage RFID [5] or QR code [3,58] as assistance to reduce the effort of using OCR to scan the product information on makeup packages (Section 4.3.3). Upon having QR codes on product packaging, future research could also leverage augmented reality on mobile devices with audio feedback to assist people with visual impairments in exploring the beauty aisle in stores (e.g., [21,37]). Exploring the beauty aisle can be more complex than a clear ground space for augmented reality.…”

“…Exploring the beauty aisle can be more complex than a clear ground space for augmented reality. This would further bring more consideration of providing additional contextual factors and having more detailed contextual descriptions [37] in beauty-specific applications.…”