Ohan Oda works at Google on an AR feature in Google Maps called Live View that he was showing off during the demo session at the XR Access Symposium. It adds some screenreader support for geospatial browsing where users can search for nearby landmarks and businesses, and Oda wanted to get some feedback and raise awareness for these accessibility features in Google Maps.

I had a chance to catch up with Oda where he elaborated on how his team's finding that most sighted users were not returning to some of the Google Maps features that had implemented the Virtual Positioning System (VPS) technologies. VPS extrapolate features from Google Streetmaps and translate it into an AR feature via computer vision that serves as a more precise version of GPS. They found internally that it was blind and low-vision users who were returning to these features more frequently because they were using them as an essential assistive technology whereas it was less useful for sighted users who could use other landmarks and street crossings as a way to orient.

Oda is wanting to lean more into the accessibility use cases of these XR features in order to be a technological driver of innovation with AR. He speaks about the default utilitarian design approach of developing new features to address the largest potential target audience, which means has meant that accessibility functionality has traditionally been deprioritized by management. He wanted to show off these features to the XR Access community, and give a heads up that these features may be coming soon. The features still have to work their way through the beta testing process before being deployed, and he's hoping that applying these universal design principles to these XR features in phone-based AR will create new assistive technology use cases that drive more feature development in the future.

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Music: Fatality