>>> Shiri Azenkot: good morning, everyone. Welcome to the second annual XR Access symposium. My name is Shiri and I'm an associate professor at Cornell Tech. That's the New York City campus of Cornell University. I'm one of the co-hosts for today's event. And I'm also a founder of the XR Access Initiative. 
>> Larry Goldberg: and I'm Larry Goldberg with Verizon media, also co-host and co-founder of this. Today's event and ongoing work wouldn't be possible without the contributions of our third partner, the partnership on employment and accessible technology, which is funded by U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Disability and Employment Policy. During today's event, you can use the hashtag #XRaccess or #XRaccesssymposium. 
>> Shiri: we also want to thank, give a very special thank you to Oculus for providing funding to cover the cost of the accommodations today. That includes the captioning and the sign language interpreter. And we're also very excited to have Be My Eyes who will be providing guided assistance and description. 
>> Larry: be my eyes has a certain way of you can get their assistance and that information has been distributed by using their app. XR Access has provided visual assistance. To download the Be My Eyes app. Look for XR Access in the events category in specialized help. You can also join our XR Access symposium Slack to ask questions of the speakers and discuss the event with other attendees. You can find the invitation for the symposium information email. The questions today will be sent in through Slack and we'll have some help sending those questions off to the speakers.
Now, some logistics. Because this is quite a large Zoom webinar, was muted upon joining the event. From this morning's tally, we believe we have more than 500 people attending. So, there's a lot of people and not everyone can join and ask their questions live, as we will be having that question and answer from our colleague Jessie. Again, you can sign up for the symposium space and we created. The interpreter will be provided during the entire duration of the day one program. If you'd like to verify, please contact us in the hashtag tech support. Closed captioning is available by clicking on the closed caption button on the bottom of your screen. Just hover your mouse if you're on desktop and the cc button will appear. In the event the captions fail to appear for technical reasons, we will use the chat function to post an alternate URL where you can view the captions in stream text on a completely separate device or separate browser window. And because chat can be very noisy for screen reader users, chat will only be used to communicate directly with the host and not the attendees. We are trying to minimize the noise for screen reader users. Again, direct questions to our Slack channel/XR Access hyphen Slack. One of the great things about all of us over the tremendous difficulties we've all had working from home in virtual environments is the forgiveness. This is the first time a lot of us are working in these environments. And i so appreciate when somebody has a dog barking in the background or a baby crawling in their laps. That's just how it goes. We ask for that same forgiveness today as we work through a complex series of events.
So, over the past year since our symposium in July of 2019, we have formed working groups and may have been meeting regularly since last summer. And they've really been doing the bulk of the work. They're going to be leading breakout sessions tomorrow. Awareness and outreach, education, application accessibility, hardware devices, and content and author. In addition we're working directly with the worldwide consortiums related efforts including a fascinating immersive captioning workbook, which you'll hear about later. 
>> Shiri: yeah. And actually since our symposium last summer, we've had 200 people joining the working groups from all kinds of different fields. We've had people from industry, developers, designers, managers. We've had people from academia. And we've also had a very good representation of people with disabilities participating throughout the different groups. And that's of course very important to us and to the initiative in general. For today's symposium, well, we've had our last number was that we've had over 340 people register. But it looks like we have a whole lot more joining us today, which is fantastic. And originally we saw that we had over 64 organizations represented here, including universities and companies and other nonprofit organizations. So that's great news. And we welcome you not just to today's symposium but also to join our working group and our research efforts. You can always find out more about what the initiative is doing on our website. That's XRaccess.org. And if you have any questions or you're looking for more ways to get involved, you can always email us at info@XRaccess.org. 
>> Larry: if I could give a few more connections too, because this really is very much a community initiative. That's why we call it the initiative. It's a community of practice with researchers, academics and people with disabilities. XRaccess.org is the home for everything we're going to be posting. The Slack channel for today's symposium, XR Access 2020.Slack.com, which you should have a direct invitation to in an email you received earlier. In Twitter we're at @XRaccess. And you can use the hashtag #XRaccess on social media platforms. We also maintain a linkedin group called XR Access. We seem to be using that quite a bit. We really do look forward to having ongoing engagement with all of you in this expanding community. 
>> Shiri: and for today, we should just not forget to mention that you can tweet about today's event. And what was the hashtag for that, Larry? 
>> Larry: XR Access or XR Access symposium. And we'll be following up after the two days' events with lots of follow-up surveys, access to all the presentations and a video that we're going to summarize two full days into about five or six minutes. So right now I'd like to welcome Bill Curtis-Davidson, emerging technology lead who's going to tell us about the emerging technologies playbook that peat created after last year's symposium. 
>> Bill Curtis-Davidson: thank you, Larry. And i want to send a warm welcome to all of you as well. I want to announce today the launch of a new resource by the partnership on employment and accessible technology. It's called the accessibility playbook for emerging technology initiatives. This is designed to be a blueprint for anyone seeking to launch a successful initiative to drive the development of emerging technology that are inclusively designed and accessible to people with disabilities. In the coming months, we'll be publishing a case study on the XR app that shows the steps we took to launch and sustain this initiative. If you'd like to learn more, please go to www.peatworks.org/playbook to access this resource.
And now I'd like to outline our agenda for today. After the introductory welcome remarks and presentations at 11:20 eastern time, Tom Furness will converse with me on the history and future of XR. Following at 11:40 a.m. Eastern, Matt M$ay will talk with Jennison Asuncion will accessible design. Then at 12:00 p.m. Eastern we will have a short ten-minute break. Followed at 12:10 p.m. Eastern by a conversation with Erin Hawley on advocacy in emerging technology. At 12:30 p.m. Eastern, Joel Ward will speak with Devin Boyle about accessible XR and employment. Then at 12:50 p.m. Eastern, we will talk with Shiri on research and accessible XR. At 1:10 p.m. Eastern, we will have a break where you'll be able to view demos online on our XRaccess.org symposium website. Then at 1:30 p.m. Eastern, we will have a number of research presentations followed by a 2:00 p.m. Eastern exploratory experience in Mozilla Hubs. Finally at 3:00 p.m., we will have a wrap-up discussion before adjourning our day one around 4:00 p.m. Eastern.
I'll also briefly touch on the agenda for day two as well. Tomorrow's agenda is all about getting to work as Larry and others mentioned, really this community is actively involved in a variety of ways in our working groups and associated research happening around in different initiatives. And in these breakouts, we will get to Work exploring all of that. We'll start at 11:00 a.m. With a brief introduction followed by the first session of breakouts that will be from 11:50 a.m. Eastern to 12:15 p.m. Eastern. There will be a short 15-minute break followed by the second session of breakouts at 12:30 p.m. To 1:30 p.m. Eastern. Then, after a ten-minute break, we will return to our main Zoom conference at 1:40 p.m. Eastern to do some goal-setting and report back from each breakout. Before we wrap up the session between 2:15 and 3:00 p.m. Eastern.
As a reminder, once we start our speakers in a moment, if you have questions for the speakers, sign up for the symposium Slack channel and post a question in the #plenarytalks channel. A moderator will relay those questions to each speaker after their talk. If you can't access the Slack, check your email for an information link that was sent out earlier today.