Accessibility is a crucial concept in Virtual Reality (VR), pivotal for meeting the needs of users, including those with disabilities. In recent years, there is an increasing focus of VR products on enhancing the accessibility of a diverse range of digital content. Despite this growing attention from the VR community, there is a serious lack of empirical research on how VR practitioners consider VR accessibility. This includes their understanding of and insights into VR accessibility challenges and practices in the VR software development life cycle. In this paper, we aim to address these gaps using a mixed-methods approach. Specifically, we conducted interviews with 21 VR practitioners (incl. 3D modelers, developers, technical directors, and product managers), and surveyed 202 VR practitioner respondents from VR related industries. Our findings outline their insights and challenges they face concerning VR accessibility practices in the software development life cycle. Furthermore, our findings shed light on the challenges faced by practitioners concerning VR accessibility and the reasons why it often goes unconsidered. As far as we know, this is the first comprehensive report about the understanding of accessibility for VR software from the practitioner's perspective. We hope this paper will help VR professionals to better understand the issues and challenges in VR accessibility, and the potential solutions.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713927
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