Christine Hemphill: Hello, and welcome to XR Access. Our session on inclusive design. Welcome to the session. I'm really delighted to moderate this exciting panel of inclusive designers who are designing for and with equity. So we have a really wonderful group of people here today, and perspectives. If you could each introduce yourself and say what is it around XR and immersive technologies that gets you excited and particularly around inclusive design for XR. If you're able to briefly describe yourself, as well, please do. Johan, would you like to start?

Johan Verstraete: Hello, my name is Johan Verstraete. I'm an inclusive designer and a sensory experience designer. I'm really excited to be here and to talk about XR today, especially as we're looking at the future of the inclusion of the different senses and its relationship to inclusive design so I'm very happy to be here today. 

Molly Bloom: I'm Molly. I'm an inclusive design researcher at Adobe and visual description, I'm a white woman with glasses, brown glasses and sort of long, brown hair. I have books in my background and a picture. And what excites me about XR Access and the future of XR technology is that we're building the technology from the ground up and this is a really exciting time. It's a really exciting opportunity to involve people with disabilities in the process of that and make the technology more inclusive than others have been. I'm excited to be here. Thanks. 

Regine Gilbert: I’m Regine Gilbert, a user experience designer and Industry Assistant Professor at NYU in the Integrated Design and Media department. What excites me about XR is that it's not a new technology but we are making such advances so quickly, and similar to what Molly said, we have an opportunity for folks in the accessibility world, and folks with disabilities, to really get in on this early. I'm really excited about the opportunities and happy to be here for this conversation. 

James O’Laughlin: Hi, Christine. My name is James and very happy to be here. I'm a user experience designer, independent based in New York. I've been focusing on virtual and augmented reality products and projects for a few years. Definitely included a lot of people from various backgrounds into my projects and I'm very excited about the potential of virtual and augmented reality. It is a -- there's so much potential to augment our capabilities of everyone from various backgrounds and the innovation that can be found here. It takes a lot of hard work but it can benefit everyone. Just learn from them, talk to them. Experiment with them. Include them into the design process and the development process and so – 

Christine Hemphill: Fabulous. Thank you, James. Thank you all for introducing yourself. I realized I'm neglectful in not introducing myself. I'm Christine Hemphill, I'm the Managing Director of Open Inclusion, I'm also the lead for the inclusive design for XR work stream as part of XR Access. I am very excited by inclusive design in XR, both the inclusive design element and the XR part of it, because I think by learning from people with different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives we'll make this fabulous suite of technologies just so much more engaging and enjoyable, as well as of course usable to everyone and also just not exclude people from that experience coming our way. As a description I’m a white middle aged woman. I have a wooden background behind me because our house is actually built of wood. And yes. Really looking forward to getting into this in more detail. For the next bit, I'd actually like to ask each of you if you can start by sharing across the different backgrounds you've got, which are fabulous, from research to design to building technologies and content, what is it about inclusive design not just of people with disabilities but also of any other marginalized group that excites you in terms of XR and designing and developing it in a more inclusive way. Who would like to start? James, can i throw this to you first? 

James O’Laughlin: I wanted to be a little sort of open about I’m very aware of some of the gaps in sort of the broad spectrum of humanity that I miss out on and for varying reasons, just -- in whatever design project I work on, I fail to include, like one glaring problem is I have -- for myself is I miss out on learning more about from people who are hearing impaired. Getting participants is like probably -- it's possible, totally possible but for me it's been a learning curve. 

Christine Hemphill: Thank you, James. Johan, to you. Your thoughts in terms of inclusive design. 

Johan Verstraete: Yes. Well, I think we need to start from a human centered gains perspective which means that is there are a lot of people who are excluded and that's sometimes we don't actually start from that excluded population. I believe that those experiences are really important. I believe if we start from the people who are kind of up on the edge or extremes of experiences we get to those innovators, we get to those creative problem solvers, and we bring in the perspectives that we didn't think of at all. As I've said before, like with deaf users, you're looking at people who may have very strong visual acuity, visual perception, observational acuity, they may actually be able to help with an innovation related to music, to things that you think are auditory but they could contribute greatly so actually involving people on the extreme ends of the spectrum at the beginning of the design process is huge, I think, for XR. The early innovators and the early adopters, the people outside of our normal bell curve of average, and the laggards who are on the other extreme, might never use XR might actually be the people who can bring us more innovative solutions if we go to them directly from the start and start addressing that. So that's the human centered gain perspective and I believe we can gain a lot from that. Yeah. Calling on people with disabilities but looking at it from an intersectional perspective, as well. Thinking of as you said before the diversity of human experience. I think it's -- there's so much gain that we can think of when we look at environments, culture, and people's added value. I was just saying with AR and VR and in Africa and Asia we think of those as probably being some of the early innovators and then also some of the laggards and I think as we go through those cultural perspectives and kind of see where those issues may be from the start we may find some innovations right away. 

Christine Hemphill: Thank you so much. Regine, can I pass to you? What are your thoughts on the imperatives of inclusive design as it relates to XR? 

Regine Gilbert: One of the things that I -- because I’m new to this, newer-ish. I mean, I've been in the space for the last four years. However, i don't know what I don't know. And one of the things that I really wanted to understand is the landscape of work. What this space looks like. And so my research that I've been doing is around the tools and understanding those tools and how people work with them. And next I’m going to look into design patterns and there's a lot of gaps. I think Johan and James touched on this. Quite a bit in their responses. But there's a lot of gaps between what exists and what could be. And I hope that being part of XR Access and having more people involved and I’m really encouraging more people to learn about this space so that we can fill those gaps. Right? So that we're not having this exclusion. And it's not just from a disability perspective either. I think Johan touched on, culturally there's other places we need to consider and I think when we're talking about inclusion we cannot go without speaking about this- socio economics, this space and the barriers that come along with that. So there is a lot to be explored in inclusion in the XR space and I'm really looking forward to it. 

Christine Hemphill: Thank you, Regine. I love the calling out that you don't know what we don't know. I think this is true of absolutely all of us. This is an emerging technology space and there is no stable base from which we -- any of us stand, and that curiosity and recognizing that we don't know as much or more than we do know is what keeps us reaching and learning, and progressing fast, and bringing more people in is equally so important because those different perspectives themselves bring in so much richness to our community. Molly, over to you. The imperatives of inclusive design in this space from your perspective? 

Molly Bloom: Okay, yeah. The imperatives for inclusive design, I see XR technology as very future oriented. It's this expanding technology, right? With my work at Adobe I have seen how there are so many improvements to be made on these tools that people are using to build out the future. These tools have not always been thought of from an inclusive perspective, and that means that the tools aren't inclusive, if they're not inclusive of people with disabilities, and as the folks on this panel have spoken about people who are also not thought about in design. People who have lower socio economic statuses, people who are not in Western countries, right, if those creators don't have the ability to build stuff then technology is just going to keep expanding these inequalities that we see. We've seem a lot of examples of that. I think XR Access, this group and XR technology as being a technology of the future, right, the imperative is, and I'm building on Regine, Johan, and James's comments just the imperative is to make sure that these tools are able to be used by people who might not have had access to the building of the future. If we're not involving more people, and enabling them to build the future we'll keep building inequity in the world. 

Christine Hemphill: I think that's such important knowledge in that comment. That constantly listening, learning, expanding, which I know is a huge part of your role, with a research background and bringing that knowledge into a format that people who are not engaged at the front end of gathering that knowledge can reuse and can learn without everyone replicating having to gather that knowledge in primary format. So whether it's approaches, tools, things that designers and developers can pick up with some inclusion built into it and some of that knowledge that's constantly able to be expanded more efficiently essentially across the creation community. That's a perfect segue, and I didn't set this up, but thank you, into the next question which is really around what are the tools that you're using today or the approaches and where you're reaching to to bring inclusive design in XR? Are they in XR today? Or are you bringing them in from other formats of technology or other areas of design? What have we got today? And then after this I'll ask you about what we need in the future, but to start with, what have we got out there that's useful for people to reach to to help them increase their skills, learning or efficiency in inclusive design now? Regine, can I start with you? Because I know you've done a lot of work in this space. 

Regine Gilbert: Sure. There's a few things out there. I think the first thing that comes to mind for me is the W3C has their - everything is a work in progress. And they have some XR user requirements that are pretty good, as a good starting point to understanding what's needed for the XR space. The XR Association has a really excellent developer guide around XR. And I recently published this on LinkedIn is a list of XR tools and their lack of accessibility really is showcased. But also I discuss whether things are -- cost money or if they're free because I think that's important to understand if someone is trying to get into this space let's say on the developer side, what can they use? With the equipment they have and everything else. So that's just a starting point. I think just getting to understand the space and because there are so many tools you have to really figure out what you want to be doing and work your way backwards. 

Christine Hemphill: Yeah. Thank you. I think the work you're doing and maybe we can get that into XR Access is so important because it's quite hard to find if you're on the outside and different people find different things and different tools will be fit for purpose in different situations for different designers or developers. The other point I think you were making there is, are the tools themselves accessible? Can we have a creator community with access needs, with various disabilities or other needs, that are being supported by the tools themselves? And that is equally as we're creating new tools to fill the gaps going to be a really important consideration. Molly, can I ask you next, what tools are you using today? Where are you leveraging your knowledge from and what's valuable that you like? 

Molly Bloom: The tools that I use are probably different than the folks who are designers because I’m a researcher. But one of -- I use research tools, my favorite being ethnography, which is building deep understanding with the people that you are building for but what I hope to see happening in the future and seeing pushes for is on the research space we need to -- I think we need to break the tools of user research a little bit because they're a little exploitative, particularly if you want to engage people who tend not to be included as a design process, to engage with folks in a way that is only for asking them about their experiences but not giving them a seat at the table in the design is not fundamentally shifting inequities. I think the research tools that we are going to be moving towards that I’m really excited and trying to figure out how to engage with the tools like participatory design and co-design, and like how about just hiring? Right? Hiring more diverse groups, right? That we've got a lot of DNI tools and got to get more diverse folks at the table. 

Christine Hemplhill: Molly, absolutely love this. As a researcher myself, deep research like ethnography, this is so valuable and not many people have the opportunity to do it so when we do have that value feeding in like a fuel into the system, making sure that's available and that we share that in ways that other people can learn from is really important. Johan, over to you. You've heard fabulous inputs from the others and I know you have some very interesting perspectives bringing in other senses. What are the tools that excite you that are available or approaches that you think we can bring to immersive that may support people creating more inclusive solutions? 

Johan Verstraete: Yes. Actually, I love to bring the perspective of inclusive design management here because I think that that connects with the sensory experience going into immersive technology. I think one of the things that we talked about already is trying not to narrow our perspectives down to just one solution and to hold off within the design process and really look at the ideation process as an excellent opportunity for us to innovate. So we need to broaden out, within emerging technology, we need to broaden out instead of having narrow solutions, having more customizable, more comfortable solutions using different senses. Not just relying on the accessibility perspective but hold off on that and do the research based on extreme experiences and then we can actually hone in on accessibility later on as we design for everyone. Hopefully the accessibility will be built in from the start. So from a design management perspective, I'd like to say that I’m trying to avoid just designing for the technology. It's very complicated when we design just for technology or one tool. So one of the things i'd like us to look at with inclusive design and the immerse space is to look at all of the senses that are going to be involved. And what kind of tools we actually have available. We have a lot of audio/visual tools if we're looking at creating immersive experience like a motorcycle. We think about the actual full experience from the auditory experience, smell experience, we try and see what kind of technology is available that can provide us some sort of connection with that experience and then we make those experiences customizable. That's my dream is that in this immersive environment that we would be able to make them customizable so that no one person is overwhelmed by any experience. Can have a full sensory experience, using all of the senses, and then other people can use one or the other and that result, what we create, is a fully inclusive and accessible experience at the end. I think that inclusive leadership is important to develop the tools to make sure that that's available. 

Christine Hemphill: Thank you so much. I think that inclusive design management approach, that is true right across all layers of this. And whether it's ideation, broadening out early, or the adaptability rather than a one size fits no one, thinking about how do we design solutions where as you say people aren't overwhelmed but they are included. And that requires people being able to adapt to their preference and needs. Can I ask you to finish up by sharing two things? One thing that you really wish was there today? A gap there that you wish was fulfilled and one thing that you wish that people who are listening to this today could take away and just keep it fairly short each, but - Regine, if I could start with you? 

Regine Gilbert: From a learning perspective I think wherever you see that you have some interest, you might have interest in augmented reality, you might have interest in virtual reality, you may not know what any of it is, so I would say just start learning and I think I’m big now on moving from awareness to action, and so become aware and then start acting, start doing, start getting involved. 

Christine Hemphill: Thank you. I love them. Molly, over to you. 

Molly Bloom: Yeah. One thing that I see as not being there is there are not enough people hired who are building these XR technologies who come from underrepresented or diverse perspective. That's not there. Let's work on that. One thing that people can do, for those that are designing, consider deeper engagements with research. Of course I'm going to put a plug in for research but let's make sure we're putting a really concerted effort towards talking to the people who are going to be using this technology or who you might not even imagine will be using the technology. Get their perspectives, and let those guide where you want to build. 

Christine Hemphill: Thank you, Molly. Johan, over to you. 

Johan Verstraete: Okay. So my dream for the XR space is really for people from different cultures, different backgrounds, diverse perspectives to be part of a cocreation process that we all learn from each other and create a co-creative community of people with diverse experiences. Within the XR space what I want you to learn is that we are not going to try to start from just the solution. I don't want people to be afraid. I want them to think about this as an opportunity for us to create experiences for everyone. And that we can learn from people with excluded experiences to create incredible experiences for all. 

Christine Hemphill: Thank you, Johan. What a great message. James, to you. 

James O’Laughlin: There's probably some still fundamental things that like very fundamental things nothing to do with XR as a technology to be more accessible and just like getting good -- sounds corny but good internet, computers, hardware into people's hands. You know? If somebody has a computer and let's say a VR headset and a good internet connection they have like those three pieces, they they can open the door for a lot of things. 

Christine Hemphill: Thank you for that, James. I think it's a really important point that it is still a niche technology because of the hardware problem and that while there's only a small number of people with access to hardware and while we're talking about specifically hardware enabled experience as opposed to experience that could be got through mobile phone or through a standard computer with XR elements in it, it's still very, very exclusive opposed to inclusive so absolutely right. Just to summarize, firstly, can I say, thank you to you all. That was a fabulous discussion. I really enjoyed it. So many good points across all of you. I'll pull up a couple of them for here. Just start learning. We are all on this journey and just starting to learn is the most important thing. But then as Regine said, switching from learning to action. Don't learn for the sake of it but the purpose of it and lots of different ways to learn but that listening, cocreating, researching and asking your colleagues that have different experiences, hiring colleagues with different experiences so that we can create, as Johan said, you know, the opportunity to create absolutely excellent experiences for everyone. Thank you for your time today. I hope you have a fabulous rest of the XR Access and look forward to seeing you in the next sessions and particularly in the Q & A now. 

Jessie Taft: Thank you, Christine, Regine, Johan, Molly and James. That was a fantastic discussion. So as a reminder for our attendees, you can post questions to the panelists in the topic-design channel on Slack. So first attendee question is -- I’m going to send this to Christine. In what key ways does XR accessibility design differ from traditional accessibility design, like web development or real-world spaces? 

Christine Hemphill: That is a fabulous question. Thank you to whoever posed that. Some of the key differences are the experience itself is absorbed in a different format so that format that people are absorbing that through can create exclusion or inclusion by itself and different formats whether it's a headset, whether it's just using a 2D but with a 3D overlay on it, such as AR on a smartphone, etc. So each of those formats, there's a hardware element to inclusion or exclusion, and it's a little bit different because it's new. Interestingly I'll speak a little bit and say there's similarity to it but it's where bringing together because XR is a fabulously interesting space because it brings both physical design, physical product design, physical environment design, things like wayfinding, is just as important in XR as it is in the physical world, if you're finding your way through a maze or an environment. And digital design and content design and content management. So a lot of the tools and approaches we have used in 2d technologies. Captioning, audio described, clear content, content visual design and so on is all just as relevant here. So it's emerging, essentially, as these three areas of physical product, physical environment and digital design all coming together. The point at which you can test it, though, is experience. So it's just understanding at the end of it it's a new experience and how is that experience received by people with different access needs, with different preferences and with different approaches? And yeah. Asking and understanding that is how we solve for this. 

Jessie Taft: Thank you, Christine. So our the next question is from Deb on Slack. I'll send it to Christine and then the other panelists can comment you would like. What work flow do you follow when designing for XR? 

Christine Hemphill: I might pass that to someone else. James, do you want to take this one and if anyone wants to add to the answer on the last one please feel free to. James, do you want to start on this one? 

James O’Laughlin: Work flow for the design process for XR. That is probably a very fluid question. I can probably -- it depends on the project, like depends on what your role is on the project and it also depends on where the project is. Like if you're coming into the middle or starting from scratch. So I guess if you -- say hypothetically you're by yourself and as a UX designer I can probably come from that as a best experience in that regards. UX designer starting from scratch I highly recommend you start doing research and broad terms of technical research in terms of -- more probably importantly is what problem you are trying to solve. What kind of value you are trying to provide people. This is just general good product design. Nothing to do with XR and XR is sort of like my belief is that XR is a solution and nothing to do with the problem and just trying to figure out the problem. And then I think more relevant to the XR Access is you want to start figuring out how you are going to start listening to people really quick. And starting to get participants of varying backgrounds. Due to constraints you probably have to be more focused on who am I going to listen to in this problem space that I’m trying to address? And try to design that and make assumptions, you have to start making assumptions at some point, and then maybe as time goes on back that up reevaluate things, iterate on those research assumption, and start doing user research, doing what's called problem setting which has nothing to do with XR. It has everything to do with figuring out what value or problem, however you want to frame it, not everything is a problem. So like if you're making a game, you create entertainment. Adds value to people. The solution space is a totally different pathway and been -- XR is the solution for you, then you're opening up a wide spectrum of technical possibilities whether it's mobile and tablet, augmented reality. And then knowing what solution to use also requires technical research and it's a whole different thing to assess. And as far as the design process, let's just say you had all that stuff figured out. The problem is set. A strategy is formed and all that stuff, and you should probably be doing this on a parallel basis. Just prototyping, testing, iterating, and when I say testing if you can bring those people from the beginning who you are listening to into the user testing process then that would help your product a lot more or getting participants. That's an abstract view. This is just -- you know, when it comes to UX design it is all -- there's very little, hey. Very little, very little different. Probably more nuance and things that are specific to XR products and even within XR there's wearable XR, mobile, tablet based AR type of products so -- we can get into the weeds and specifics on that but in terms of abstract broad, you know, it is probably the sort of a pathway in general I would in general go with. 

Jessie Taft: Great, thank you so much, James. So I’m going to send the next question to Molly, actually. This is from Jesse on slack. As an XR user, what is the best way you recommend to develop and communicate with developers and platforms on improving accessibility? 

Molly Bloom: Thank you so much for the question. I think the best way for me to answer that is to say that first of all, if you are having a hard time reaching out to folks to get your feedback back to them, that's not your fault. We need to make sure that the organizations that are creating these technologies have a way to really account for accessibility and really account for the feedback of people who have accessibility needs. I know at Adobe, that's something that we're working to build out right now. And from a business side, it's hard, from the consumer side, I think that anything that you can do for now, until there's a really good pathway for you to communicate with, for instance, somebody who's working on Oculus, which would ideally, in my perspective, be something like a continued research engagement or a continued almost codesign. But until that structure is there, you can communicate about things on platforms like twitter, you can add feature requests because those, from what I have seen on the business side, when people realize that customer are asking about these accessibility things, that's how people who are making decisions about where to send resources who might not really understand sort of the necessity for accessibility, that's the best way to get their attention, right, so that's, I think, as an individual, that's the best thing that you can do for now. I think your question is an indication that as an industry, right, XR and tech in general still needs to continue to build out these pipelines so that we have a much easier way of connecting with people. I know that some of the folks on this panel have built out that pathway already, right, so some organizations do better than others, but I think it's a big problem. And I think that until you've got a pathway just making sure that you're sort of publicly saying, hey, you know, these are the things I need, right, that will help build a business case for why there should be a deeper engagement on accessibility and ultimately a connection between people who are using XR, and people who have accessibility needs, and thank you so much for the question. 

Jessie Taft: Thank you, Molly. So we have a couple of questions in the chat about what it's like to do user research during the pandemic, so what are the challenges that you've faced with -- actually, i’m going to send this to Regine and you can pass it off to others. What are the challenges you have encountered or successes using remote tools for user research, and what sort of work arounds have you found to bypass those challenges? 

Regine Gilbert: Obviously, we cannot meet anybody in person, so that is the biggest challenge, but zoom, zoom has been lovely. Zoom for usability testing has worked well, actually, and having the ability to kind of, you know, record these things and see them back, one of the things is there's been more availability of folks because people are at home. So there is that. And I don't know, it has been a challenge, especially in the XR space where with, you know, having headsets and not necessarily being able to -- before we used to share headsets, and now that's not a thing. So my research hasn't involved much of that yet, but it will, and so it's going to be interesting to see how to move forward, but I’m sure Molly has some more insight than me. 

Molly Bloom: I'll jump in. I think that, yeah, I think -- I’m just -- I was just sort of responding to Jesse on Slack, and I’m thinking about how we actually make this structural change, right, it's a question of individuals who are using the technology, and then it's really also a question about being able to really articulate the business case so that we can have more support and deeper engagement. I can add a little bit to that as well. I think, you know, the wonderful thing about inclusive research, is it's really quite well set up for the pandemic because it made it easier to reach to more people by having some people engaging remotely even prior to the pandemic period so using formats such as Zoom, and mixed formats which will probably move to, again, in the future, as some people wish to engage face-to-face, and some people wish to stay, you know, isolated to find travel difficult is something that is really helpful for everyone so people can choose what format best suits them, and they can save their energy for the participation, not for the getting there and getting back, whether that's virtual or physical. 

Christine Hemphill: A couple of things, you know, one really good point, Regine, keeping people safe, sharing devices between people, and there are ways of cleaning products very well. I've done another project on antimicrobial treatment of products so making sure if there is any sharing of devices, it goes back to someone and gets fully cleaned before it gets sent to anyone else. It is difficult in XR, because not everyone has a device that you want to test on and it may go otherwise to people that already have experience of using devices more so, so just recognizing if you're building bias in to some degree, either by more experience or less that you're understanding where you're building back in, so it's not a problem. It's just a recognition. The other thing with inclusive research is as my research director would always remind me that it's a little bit more time up front. It's just making sure you create the time up front to think through how this experience is going to play out for everyone involved in the research, and creating the right sets of information for each of them in a way that suits them, that they can understand, and they can then safely turn up with all of their energy and impact for the session itself. Thank you. 

Johan Verstraete: I'll probably add -- I have something to add to that as well. Okay. So one example is that a lot of companies actually invest more money on user research now mostly with AR because of the pandemic, because in a lot of cases people are afraid to go to a lot of stores, and they feel that they can't go or they feel that they really can't touch things, so they're investing more in user research in regards to that in ways that people can use AR technology to actually tour a facility, to buy a bed or another product, and I believe that the pandemic has had positive impacts in that way. It happened to make accessibility better for other people as well. So people with and without disabilities. 

James O’Laughlin: Thank you very much. I guess, to build on some of the comments made already, like, the user testing in person is very difficult during the pandemic. And obviously, like, just as everyone said, with wearable VR or AR, you know, being in person is -- you get so much richer feedback on -- especially with people who have never touched VR or AR products before. So there is -- so, like, it has been a learning curve. I think there's an opportunity to create remote tools. Rather than boutique tools, but remote tools to help with remote user testing where, you know, you can get so much feedback just from like the motion control movements, you can record that, and record whether it's a motion controllers or hand tracking or eye tracking, you know, obviously with the participant's full, you know, permission, and of course so like, yeah, the pandemic, doing remote testing with people who -- like Christine said, with people who only have the equipment, you know, it's sort of narrows your user base, and not in a great way, and so, yeah, it's been a learning curve, at least from my perspective. I don't have really a great answer, but it is definitely something everyone's trying to figure out together. 

Jessie Taft: Thank you all very much for those great answers. So our next question comes from Miles on slack. I'm going to send this one to Johan. Do you feel we have enough people with disabilities who are taking leadership roles in XR Access-like, and if not, what can we do to increase representation of people with disabilities in these roles? 

Johan Verstraete: A really good question, but I would like to be careful with this because we make quick assumptions, because people with disabilities, that are invisible make up about 70% of the population, so it's a challenge for us. There are a lot of people willing to say they have a disability, and others that do not want to label themselves as such. It is a challenge. My belief is that in the U.S. there is a lot of leadership on this front. In Europe, we're a bit behind. The challenge is that we are trying to advocate in Africa as well, but the cultural context of the country has an effect. So we need to improve actually the leadership and inclusive design, not related to whether or not you have a disability, but really about empowering that leadership. And empowering people with disabilities, whether they be visible or invisible. It is also best to teach trainings to people who have disabilities to allow them to become leaders, to mentor them. My mentor taught me how to bring myself forward, how to empower others. How to advocate for myself and my community, and that has a lot of impact. So it's very important for people with disabilities to be in these leadership positions but we do have to have patience and get up to that point. 

Jessie Taft: Thank you very much. Our next question comes from Bill on slack. What are some -- i'll send this one to Christine. What are some of the new possibilities for inclusive design in XR that result from new kinds of sensors and input devices, and also going off of that, in general, what are some hardware limitations? So how to include input for different kinds of senses? 

Christine Hemphill: Great question, thank you. Sensors are such an interesting thing because they allow us to pick up one of the great gaps that we have once we move away from in-person research, and we're doing more remote research. This is what James was alluding to before, as an example, we can see how people are moving, a bit like in 2D, we can see eye tracking and where on a screen people are, you know, are touching with their eyes, and how much time they're spending on it, with heatmaps. We can do the same in XR by using sensors to start to pick up how are people engaging, so what are they doing? What are they acting on? That allows us to pick up two sides of research. One is behavioral, which is what are people doing, and the other is attitudinal, by asking them, what are you thinking now, what are you looking for next, what are you trying to find here, what are you trying to solve or how does that make you feel, so the kind of attitudinal questions. Sensors will make this much easier to do. They do come, obviously, with consent, they do- Anything that we ask people to do, where that feedback goes back, making it clear to people that this is how we're collecting information, and therefore your movements will be taken as well, and your eyes, and so on. So just making it really clear and obvious to people how we're collecting information. The other thing that's really important that we haven't spoken about with research, and it's more important in remote research, is the end-to- end experience of set up, use, and put away because if you have a very accessible content and piece of experience you're trying to test with someone with various access needs, but they can't set it up individually, and independently, that might again limit who you can engage with people where they've got someone else in the house that can help move that, and it's one of those things we're seeing a lot with emerging technology, the inclusive design often starts at the center of the experience and takes a little while to work towards the edges of the experience from setting it up to maintaining it, to keeping it charged to being able to upload new information to it and so on. So end-to-end experience is going to be more and more critical as well. Anyone else wish to add anything to that? I'm sure that's about half an answer to a very good question. 

James O’Laughlin: Just to build on what you said Christine, you know, like there's a lot of people with motor disabilities who can't even wear VR or AR headsets as they are right now. So I mean, obviously everyone, you know, in the industry is you know, especially the engineers and hardware manufacturers have like a challenge ahead of them to try to make these wearables more accessible in terms of like an industrial design sense. Also, there's that end. There's also on the other end, this technology has so much biometric fidelity, as I would call it, where you can gather so much information, and it's going to increase as time goes forward, whether it's just your head tracking, your hands, even what is also very important, I found, is like the capacitive touch sensors on most of the VR, and some of the AR controllers, where that matters, like, if you have motor disabilities, you know, the sensitivity to this -- sensitivity to the sensors, and how much feedback they can gather from the user does matter, and Regine has said in the past, options is also very important. Not only options in terms of sort of accessibility settings, but options in terms of input and the output, whether it's sound and haptics and stuff like that. The biometric sensors, the standard and the bar is going to just keep on moving forward, you know. Eye tracking is almost a standard across devices, and I can speculate further, but, you know, it's just -- it's going to add so much more fidelity and what do we do with that. 

Regine Gilbert: Just to, you know, feed off what you're saying there, James, as with many things, I think extreme use cases will really drive this forward, and if you look at health care at the moment, and obviously health care has been exceptionally pushed over the last couple of years, so, you know, year and a half with the Covid crisis, that remote health has just had a huge boost of energy, and XR is one way that remote health can be delivered, and the requirements for sensors, and to be able to know where people are in space, if you're, say, delivering some physical therapy for someone, where you're saving them the pressure but also the time of going into a hospital, which, you know, at the moment is overloaded anyway, we can use XR technology for that. I know there's been a huge amount of use cases developing in that area, and that's where I'd go looking for some of that early use of sensors, and sensor enabled capability, because they need to make it right there, and then building that in, as we say into optionality. For who would need that, just in other parts of technology. 

Johan Verstraete: Can I add on to that as well? Yeah, I’m thinking about what Christine said about sort of the end-to-end experience, and if we're thinking about starting from just the experience, right, we're not necessarily thinking about how people acquire the hardware that they need for VR, so that's a question that we need to think about as well, right, if we want to enable these experiences for more people. How are we also going to enable them to purchase the hardware, right, and how are we going to empower them to sort of get to the accessibility that so many people have been thinking about. 

Jessie Taft: Thank you so much, all of you, for such a great discussion. We have one minute left, so I’m hoping we can do one more rapid fire question so I’m going to give this one to Johan first, but i would love to hear quick answers from all of you on this one. What in your opinion is the one greatest unsolved challenge in accessibility in user experience and interaction? 

Johan Verstraete: Well, a lot of people actually focus on quick solutions within UX, and what we need to do is practice divergent thinking first, and really focus on human centered design, brainstorm ideas, and then focus on our solutions, so not go to accessibility first, but learning from that first, and do divergent thinking and focus on our solution later. 

Molly Bloom: I'll pop in, and this is just, I keep reading the chat, right, and we're seeing a lot of people who are wanting to give feedback, and not being sure how to do that. I think we need to enable a better pipeline, and a stronger infrastructure and platform for something like codesign, so that people who are actually using this technology have a way to get their feedback in a more, you know, structurally supported way. 

Christine Hemphill: Molly, I'll pick up on that and add my short one here, which is if you don't know where to provide feedback, come and join XR Access, we would love to have you, join the idXR community because this is a place we're hoping to gather that feedback, and you know, use it. So even if it's just as a hub that can then go out, so join the community, and get involved, and secondly, for the people who are creating in any format, whether it's designers, developers, hardware manufacturers, any level of creation throughout the process, that comment that Johan said, start at the edges, if you could only get six people to feed back on something, go right to the edges of experience, and start there because some of it will be on the edge of experience, and one of the characteristics, their other characteristics, will take them through the center, so you're not missing out on anything but you're gaining a lot more, and the more difference you have between the different people that you've got engaged, the greater diversity you've got to design with for and to create a solution that will solve and and support. 

Regine Gilbert: And I would just add that to Johan's point, human centered design, what unites us as humans, and what connects us all, and cross culturally, because I think a lot of things tend to be from a Western perspective. This morning I was talking to somebody from the University of Kuwait, and there's a completely different perspective, so I think looking at things from a human centered design perspective, and cross culturally, right, and intraculturally is something we could do a lot more of and a lot better. 

James O’Laughlin: I'll probably stay, you know, I’m going to Regine has said lately and in the past, action is very much a requirement. I think in the XR space, there's enough -- things have matured enough where we can, you know, build things and iterate, and learn from, and you know, continue to develop tools in the XR space, so I think more tools for developers to implement these various options. Because right now, I mean, it depends on what tools they use, and, you know, what platforms they use, but for XR, you know, the easier you can make a developer, and this goes into the building problem, this goes into like, you know, focusing on, just like if you can -- building off what everybody said, just focusing on one space, see if you can build something that developers can use, and they can just plug it in to, you know, Unreal Engine, Unity, whatever platform, and that's hard. It's not easy. It's definitely -- we're in the -- we talk about action, it's partly an engineering problem. And that's where we're at right now, i think, with XR. It has developed enough where there's design problems, and there's also engineering problems, and building these things will hopefully come sooner than later. 

Jessie Taft: Well, thank you all for these fantastic answers again. That's all time we have for questions. There are a few other questions that did not get answered in the slack channel, so I’m hoping that some of our panelists can stay around for a few more minutes and answer questions there, and now we're going to move into a 15- minute break.