Comments on: Second Life - what are your thoughts?

By: Henny

Henny — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 18:13:56 +0000

Nik: Thank you for your comments, you raise some issues that I’m sure others have thought and not felt they can post here. There are many people with visual impairments as well as a huge amount of other people with disabilities that affect their mobility, speech or hearing who love to be in virtual worlds and play games online. I don’t believe the fact that you don’t have one sense and the application in question, such as the SL grid, is excessively difficult to make accessible is reason enough to exclude folk. I know many people in SL who are effectively stuck at home unable to go out who find that SL is literally a lease of life.

For info there are plenty of online games that are accessible and there is much research and development going into making SL accessible too. IBM have a project looking into using sound for navigation and there are also projects looking at brain computer interfaces. I agree it is a hard task but let’s not let that be a reason not to try.

While not a legal person I would also say that there are quite possibly legal implications of locking people out. Many established international and small businesses use SL as a means of recruitment, employment and research. This could leave them in a vulnerable position if some of these services were available only in SL. And again, I would argue that people with disabilities, blind or otherwise, can find themselves isolated and marginalised so having easy access to a world of education and employment from the comfort of their own home is a huge thing.

ShanDae Bachem: You’re correct. CAPTCHA’s do have an alterative which is being read out loud. I blogged about CAPTCHA elsewhere in this blog and ran through the issues there. Using sound in-world is something IBM are looking at (see above). We already have a little bit of that in that the sound of the sea gets louder as you approach and conversations louder. Building on this and making it more accessible is certainly something that is being looked into and I imagine will be progressed.

Thanks for your comments, keep ‘em coming!

By: ShanDae Bachem

ShanDae Bachem — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 01:14:09 +0000

In regards to the issue with starting an account (and that security code)…
It’s been a bit since I started my account. Isn’t there an option to have the code read aloud? This is commonly done on other sites. It would be interesting to learn how someone else who is visually impaired would navigate ‘inworld’.

By: Nik Radford

Nik Radford — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 10:24:16 +0000

I know this is going to sound awful. But if someone can’t see the 3D virtual world, what’s the point? They have to be able to navigate the world. It isn’t a website, the actual website is just where you create your account, you can’t access any of the communities without getting a client and the Linden Labs client is a 3d graphics application. Your only sense available for navigating the world is sight or sound, since touch, smell and taste have yet to be implemented electronically.

If SL was simply a chat room, I’d understand that things need to be sorted. But unfortunatly, due to the nature of the beast, it can’t be made accessible. Just a query, what do blind or very visionally impaired people do when faced with games like FEAR, WoW and the like? Where the interaction is mainly in a visual 3D world?

As to the less important point of requiring broadband connections. Thats simple, SL transfers HUGE amounts of data at any one time, the 3D world is “streamed” from the internet to your computer (unlike world of warcraft, where the world exists on your hard drive and only user positions and such are sent).

By: Lola

Lola — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 20:55:15 +0000

Hi all, it’s really encouraging to see all the work that’s being done to make SL more accessible. I am in the process of writing up the findings of my research. Should be done by the end of this December. If anyone is interested in getting the results or sharing information you can email me at secondlife_test@yahoo.com

By: Henny

Henny — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 09:37:26 +0000

Hi All,

I’ve been following a lot of the work that has been going on around the accessibility of the SL grid and collating it. Some time soon I will post it up here but tend to post more about SL on my own blog at http://iheni.wordpress.com so come and check there for bits of information.

Henny

By: Constantinos

Constantinos — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 03:51:21 +0000

my e-mail is conva49@googlemail.com

By: Constantinos

Constantinos — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 03:50:28 +0000

I am a student at university and I am currently doing an evaluation report on second life. I would be really greatful, if anyone would share their experience and thoughts on improvement on second life

By: Henny

Henny — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 17:45:07 +0000

Lola, it would be really interesting to know how your research went and if there is anything we can help you with. Roel, I’d also be interested to visit your Island in SL and meet some of your students. I’ll drop you a line Roel but if lola or anyone else is interested in meeting up in-world then drop me a line at accesssecondlife@gmail.com and we can swap details there.

Henny

By: Roel

Roel — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 21:37:26 +0000

Hello Lola,

Do you already have some results of the questionnaire? I am very interested. Where can I find some results? Is it possible to mail you? I am from the Netherlands, Fontys University of Applied Sciences in Eindhoven, and we have an island in Second life where our students (there are also students with a visual disability) work on educational projects.

If you’d like to share your results, then leave a comment here or send an email to fontyspth@gmail.com

Regards,
Roel.

By: lola

lola — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 19:06:35 +0000

Hello, I’m in my final year of university, studying for a degree in multimedia arts. I am currently working on a project, looking into how Second Life can be made more accessible to visually impaired users. If you have a visual disability and use or tried to use Second Life before, i would really appreciate if you could take some time to fill in this questionnaire. The information you provide will be used only for this research. It will help me identify the most problematic areas of SL and try to fix these problems in the more accessible prototype of the Second Life viewer i am developing.

The questionnaire can be found here http://www.thenmedia.net/test/quest/survey.php

Thank you for your time.