WORKSHOP: The 2024 XR Access Symposium

The XR Access 2024 Symposium will convene researchers and other stakeholders in the area of accessibility and XR to share research and devise a plan for making these technologies accessible to persons with disabilities. This funding will support attendees from academic institutions and nonprofit groups whose work touches accessibility and XR (collectively mixed, augmented, virtual, and extended reality, and 360 video).

This year's event, to be held at Cornell Tech's Verizon Executive Education Center in New York City on June 6-7, 2024 builds on work begun at the 2019 Symposium that brought together over 120 researchers, advocates, and industry leaders to discuss the state of XR accessibility and plan for a more accessible future, and is the sixth in the series. The scope of the 2024 Symposium spans the content creation, software development, and hardware aspects of the XR industry, and it is a key aspect of the XR Access Initiative which aims to address the needs of users with speech, motor, vision, hearing and age-related impairments, with cognitive limitations, and with emotional and learning disabilities.

There are currently 27 million Americans with low vision, 41 million who are Deaf or hard of hearing, and 18 million with limited mobility. For many of these people, using XR devices and consuming XR content is not possible. The research, design, and advocacy needed to include these users in the 18-billion-dollar XR market is still nascent.

This Symposium will have broad impact by catalyzing new research into the specific mechanisms for improving XR accessibility. It will also serve to connect scientists to advocates, educators, and business leaders to ensure that advances in the science of accessibility are implemented with input from people with disabilities and are viable at scale. Persons with disabilities from academia and nonprofits will be encouraged to attend, because no conversation about increasing accessibility in technology can go forward in a meaningful manner without including disability advocates and users with disabilities at the table from the beginning.

XR technologies are on the cusp of becoming mainstream. They will soon reshape the way we work, learn and play. However, today XR technologies are not accessible to the millions of people with disabilities around the world.

By their nature, they introduce a completely new set of challenges for people whose abilities are not typically considered in the technology design process. The Symposium will stimulate discussion and collaborative research to address questions such as: How can people with different perceptual abilities experience XR applications? How should XR hardware be designed to consider the needs of people with different abilities?

What accessibility features can enhance immersion, enjoyment, and learning through XR for all users? The Symposium will also address deeper questions about the nature and future of accessibility for emerging technologies more broadly. Unlike prior work that develops assistive technology in XR to support people with disabilities, the Symposium aims to foster research that makes XR technologies themselves accessible.

To ensure the impact of the research begun at the Symposium, the event's agenda will include meetings of cross-industry working groups, each focusing on increasing the XR Access Initiative's impact in a specific area. The Guidelines and Practices group will synthesize existing accessibility policies and practices in the XR space, and create new ones that are applicable to other emerging technologies.

Similarly, the Outreach group will focus on creating strategies for bringing awareness of the need for XR accessibility to key corporate stakeholders and to the general public.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.