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Embodied Exploration: Facilitating Remote Accessibility Assessment for Wheelchair Users with Virtual Reality

Published: 22 October 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Acquiring accessibility information about unfamiliar places in advance is essential for wheelchair users to make better decisions about physical visits. Today’s assessment approaches such as phone calls, photos/videos, or 360° virtual tours often fall short of providing the specific accessibility details needed for individual differences. For example, they may not reveal crucial information like whether the legroom underneath a table is spacious enough or if the spatial configuration of an appliance is convenient for wheelchair users. In response, we present Embodied Exploration, a Virtual Reality (VR) technique to deliver the experience of a physical visit while keeping the convenience of remote assessment. Embodied Exploration allows wheelchair users to explore high-fidelity digital replicas of physical environments with themselves embodied by avatars, leveraging the increasingly affordable VR headsets. With a preliminary exploratory study, we investigated the needs and iteratively refined our techniques. Through a real-world user study with six wheelchair users, we found Embodied Exploration is able to facilitate remote and accurate accessibility assessment. We also discuss design implications for embodiment, safety, and practicality.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Designing Upper-Body Gesture Interaction with and for People with Spinal Muscular Atrophy in VRProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642884(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)From Teleportation to Climbing: A Review of Locomotion Techniques in the Most Used Commercial Virtual Reality ApplicationsInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2024.2372151(1-21)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024

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cover image ACM Conferences
ASSETS '23: Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
October 2023
1163 pages
ISBN:9798400702204
DOI:10.1145/3597638
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial International 4.0 License.

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Published: 22 October 2023

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Author Tags

  1. Embodied Interaction
  2. Mobility and Physical Disability
  3. User-centered Design
  4. Virtual Reality
  5. Wheelchair Users

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ASSETS '23 Paper Acceptance Rate 55 of 182 submissions, 30%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 436 of 1,556 submissions, 28%

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View all
  • (2024)Designing Upper-Body Gesture Interaction with and for People with Spinal Muscular Atrophy in VRProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642884(1-19)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)From Teleportation to Climbing: A Review of Locomotion Techniques in the Most Used Commercial Virtual Reality ApplicationsInternational Journal of Human–Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2024.2372151(1-21)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024

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