IEEEVR 2025 – XRAccessibility Workshop

The workshop aims to bring together stakeholders from academia, industry, and advocacy to address and discuss the pressing challenges of accessibility in Extended Reality (XR) technologies, including Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR). XR technologies are becoming increasingly widespread; however, millions of people with disabilities and impairments (such as visual, motor, or cognitive challenges) are currently unable to fully engage with these immersive platforms. On the other hand, immersive technologies hold significant potential to make the world more accessible overall.

The primary goal of this workshop is to cultivate an international forum where participants can share ideas, solutions, and research that advance accessibility in XR. This workshop will emphasize interactive discussions with key stakeholders and focus on practical, collaborative approaches to making XR more inclusive and accessible. Through short abstract submissions, participants will present their ideas in poster sessions, fostering an environment of active exchange. Demonstrations of accessible XR solutions will complement these discussions, encouraging hands-on engagement and feedback from participants. 

By centering the voices of those directly involved in accessibility research and development, this workshop seeks to foster stronger connections across the XR community and ensure that accessibility becomes a fundamental component of XR innovation from the start. In the past, when new technologies emerged, making them accessible was always an afterthought. However, retroactive accessibility is never as effective as accessibility that is built-in from the start. It can take years to solve difficult problems around accessibility once a technology is deployed. Simply put, we must act to make XR more accessible now to ensure access to all users regardless of their needs.

In the longer term we want to engage conference attendees who are interested in, but not yet working on XR accessibility, and unsure where to start or what to work on. We hope to inspire them with stakeholder stories, inform them with presentations about the state-of-the-art and the problem areas, and help them identify potential areas of focus. Our hope is that in the future, they will present XR accessibility work at conferences, thereby helping to make real impacts in stakeholders’ lives.