This is the first of fifteen in a Voices of VR podcast series on XR Accessibility based upon my coverage from the XR Access Symposium 2023 that happened in New York City on June 15th and 16th. I'm kicking off my 8 hours of coverage with an interview with XR Access co-founder Shiri Azenkot, who is an associate professor at Cornell Tech researching accessibility. She is focusing on making augmented and virtual reality technologies accessible as well as trying to leverage XR to solve accessibility problems. XR Access was started in 2019, which was an opportunity to bring the community together and highlight some of the pioneering accessibility research such as SeeingVR: A Set of Tools to Make Virtual Reality More Accessible to People with Low Vision.

Here is an overview of the 15 episodes in my XR Accessibility series:

Shiri Azenkot on founding XR Access

Christine Hemphill on defining disability through difference

Reginé Gilbert on her book about Accessibility & XR Heuristics

Christian Vogler on captions in VR & potential of haptics

Six interviews from the XR Access Symposium poster session

Dylan Fox on the journey towards XR Accessibility

Liz Hyman on the public policy POV on XR Accessibility

Mark Steelman on accessible XR for career exploration

W3C's Michael Cooper on customizable captions in XR

Joel Ward on challenges with government contracting for accessibility and live captioning with XREAL glasses

Jazmin Cano & Peter Galbraith on Owlchemy Labs' pioneering low-vision features for Cosmonious High

Liv Erickson on intersection between AI & Spatial Computing for Accessibility

Ohan Oda on upcoming accessibility AR features in Google Maps

Yvonne Felix on using AR HMDs as an assistive technology for blind and low-vision users

Sean Dougherty & Jeffrey Colon on the challenges and opportunities in making XR accessible for blind & low-vision users

I'm also including rough transcripts for all episodes in this series as well as for my entire backlog of more than 1200 Voices of VR podcast interviews. I'm also in the process of adding categories to my episodes, which you can explore on this overview page showing the different categories. There's still more work to be done in order to make my website fully accessible, and feel to reach out to [email protected]. if you have any specific requests, feedback, questions, or comments.

This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.

Music: Fatality