Hi everyone, my name is Kathrin Gerling, and together with my co-author Katta Spiel
I carried out a theoretical examination of the accessibility of Virtual Reality for physically disabled people.
In our paper, we argue that ableist assumptions about human bodies
underpin the design of the current generation of VR systems.
More concretely, we leverage disability studies,
most importantly, the theory of the Minority Body by Barnes.
This is a post-modern theory of disability that defines being disabled
as “simply something that makes you a minority – it is a way of having a minority body”,
that can, depending on the situation, be either something that is good, neutral, or something that is bad.
We also work with Campbell’s concept of the ‘corporeal standard’,
which describes a non-disabled, supposedly ideal human body that most of us don’t have.
We combine these theories with Surrogate Body theory by Voss, which originates from Film Studies,
and postulates that viewers lend the affective expressiveness of their body
to the film and intersubjectively embody the so-called 'surrogate body'.
We previously applied surrogate body theory to entertainment technology to analyze its key elements,
including aspects such as the physical distance between players and hardware, that is,
how closely the player’s body is intertwined with it, and the type of actions that can be lent to the game,
meaning the actions that the player is expected to perform.
In the context of the work presented here, the combination of these theoretical perspectives allows us
to systematically review the different layers of VR systems with respect to access for disabled people.
Our results show that the design of the current generation of VR prioritizes non-disabled people
with respect to bodily involvement and the shape that interaction paradigms take.
For example, many wheelchair users would find bodily involvement of the legs or the trunk unsuitable,
people who interact with one arm would not appreciate the expectation of VR systems that users involve two arms,
and individuals who experience pain might find it difficult to involve their body over longer periods of time.
While these examples may seem obvious and there are of course many more nuanced examples
of how physical disability is difficult to reconcile with the bodily involvement expected by VR,
our examples do illustrate the extent to which normative assumptions about how
human bodies will be able to support interaction are ingrained in VR technology.
We also observe a lack of consideration for the integration of assistive devices,
or the need of people to engage with VR in a variety of environments.
For example, holding two controllers may not be suitable if a person also uses a cane,
interacting with the controllers may not be possible while propelling a manual wheelchair,
and the headset may not comfortably fit with the layout of the headrest of a powered wheelchair.
All of these elements contribute to increased physical distance between the body and the hardware:
either because actual physical distance is temporarily increased, for example, when placing controllers in one’s lap to propel a wheelchair,
or because the union between body and surrogate body is interrupted by uncomfortable, overly present hardware.
Hence, our analysis suggests that VR – in its current shape – does not attend to the experiences of people with physical disability.
For most dimensions of the surrogate body, physical disability results in what Barnes would call a local bad,
limiting the accessibility of the current generation of consumer VR technology.
We therefore conclude that the current design of VR technology propagates the ‘corporeal standard’,
and needs to be regarded as a technology with underlying ableist assumptions that diminish the experiences of disabled people.
Moving ahead, we suggest to focus on design strategies that appreciate the diversity of bodies as a starting point for design.
This would allow us to shift from a paradigm of ‘making accessible for’ to the perspective of ‘creating for’,
and thereby, we would have the opportunity to account for disabled people from the very start of system development.
More generally, this means that we need to take our responsibility as technology developers and HCI researchers:
Too often, we seem to be surprised by the inaccessibility of body-centric technology,
for example when we observe it in evaluations,
when we should have been able to reflect on accessibility issues at the very beginning of the design process.
Thank you very much,
and please read our paper for a more detailed and nuanced analysis and presentation of our findings.