December 8, 2021
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 work, Jaylin and her coauthors 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, they created prototype accessible alternatives that they evaluated in a study with 10 blind participants to explore their perceptions of accessible AR. This study demonstrates that these prototypes make AR possible to use for blind users and reveals a number of insights for future work. This work sets forth not only examples for developers to create accessible AR applications, but also a roadmap for future research to make AR comprehensively accessible. Jaylin will also discuss some of her other projects, and their implications for AR accessibility.
About the Speaker
Jaylin Herskovitz is a 3rd year PhD student at the University of Michigan advised by Anhong Guo. She is interested in creating augmented reality tools for accessibility and collaboration. In this talk, she will present her paper ‘Making Mobile Augmented Reality Applications Accessible’, completed as an intern at Apple.