Textsl: a screen reader accessible virtual world client for second life
by eelke folmer on Oct 28, 2009
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Virtual worlds are not accessible to users who are visually impaired as they lack any textual representation that can be read with a screen reader. We developed an interface modeled after text based ad...
Virtual worlds are not accessible to users who are visually impaired as they lack any textual representation that can be read with a screen reader. We developed an interface modeled after text based adventure games like zork that allows a screen reader user to iteratively interact with the popular virtual world of second life.
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Natalie Gimm
I am here today to present the results on developing a command based interface that allows users who are visually impaired to access popular virtual worlds such as Second life using a screen reader.
Second I am going to explain some of the barriers that users who are visually impaired face when trying to access virtual worlds. Then I’m going to present TextSL which is an interface that allows screen reader users to access the popular world of Second Life. Then I’m going to present the results of a users study we conducted and I’ll finish this talk with discussing some areas for future research.
Virtual worlds have experienced significant commercial success World of Warcraft has more than 12 million registered accounts, and Second life more than 16 million. World of warcraft generated more than 1 billion dollars in revenue and second life’s economy is bigger than that of a small african country.
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Information technology research company gartner estimates that 80% of the active internet users will have some virtual world account in 2012 and estimates the current number of virtual citizens to be around 50 million. Because of their success virtual worlds may someday replace the world wide web.
When we talk about virtual worlds replacing the world wide web, social virtual worlds have a much higher potential because of their large degree of customization that is similar to how the world wide web works. Consequently the focus of our research is on social virtual worlds which I from now on will refer to as virtual worlds.
Second Life has hundreds of communities for example brigadoon is a community for individuals with asperger syndrome.
Secondlife is being used for numerous other purposes such as business, politics, religion, research and health care.
Users interact with virtual worlds through a client application called a viewer. This viewer is similar to a browser and supports a number of basic functions such as navigating your avatar, either by walking flying or teleporting. Communication is supported through a text based chat interface or recently using voice over IP. The viewer supports interacting with interactive objects that allow users to drive a car, play a game or watch a video. The creation of content is an important function for social virtual worlds as it drives the expansion of virtual worlds as well as supports the development of virtual economies. In second life numerous users make a living of selling virtual content.
For input these games use the same controls as the controls for sighted users use e.g. arrow keys and hotkeys to interact with objects or other characters.
Now if you develop an audio game then you as a developer own the content and you can easily augment objects with audio cues or earcons. In second life everything is owned by the users and consequently you don’t have the rights to change existing objects. also where audio cues make sense if you walk around in a dungeon with monsters in Second life there are simply too many objects that are difficult to represent using audio or earcons. Techniques such as earcons or a sound radar have the goal to allow a users to quickly identify enemies, but as there is no combat in second life there is no need to for such mechanisms.
Synthetic speech seems to be the only applicable solutions as objects do have a name field and sometimes a description.
With regard to input, although it would be possible to navigate a character with arrow keys we found that virtual worlds like second life are very densely populated with objects which makes navigation difficult without getting stuck or bumping into objects all the time. The biggest problem we found however is interacting with objects and avatars. A shortcut based approach doesn’t scale up to support numerous types of interactions with large numbers of objects and avatars. Avatars can interact with objects in several ways but objects themselves can be scripted to provide new functionality you could open a car door drive a car sometime like that is difficult to support through hotkeys as you would run out of keys on your keyboard, not to mention that the user must memorize all these interactions. We needed something more flexible.
To make virtual worlds accessible we developed an interface called textsl, this is a standalone application that can extract a textual description from a virtual world that can be read with a screen reader. We went for a screen reader based approach as users who are visually impaired use these a lot and they allow for detailed customizations often more than what can be done with synthetic speech provided by an API. We use the LibSecondLife library which is an API for connecting to the second life servers. We encapsulated this library so we can easily connect to other virtual worlds allowing for Text SL to be used as a Virtual world agnostic research platform. Because we don’t do any rendering it can run on a low end machine, possibly even on a smartphone.
1) Second Life is very densily populated with objects. We build a bot that acts like a spider which analyzed large regions of Second Life and we found that on average you can find 13 objects within a 10 meter radius around the user. Some names of objects may be really long you may easily overwhelm the user with feedback when you all put it through a screen reader. Also it makes it very hard to navigate anywhere within second Life without running into things.
2) Another problem which is actually the opposite problem of the first is that many objects actually lack meta data. When you create an object in second Life you can give it a name but as most content creators figure that you can see what the object is almost 40% of the objects in Second Life are called “object”. This is a problem you see “object object object object”
The first is that we use a summarizer that tries to synthesize information. It will cull non descriptive objects and also rank the objects based on their distance and name assuming that a longer name implies a more accurate description. We implemented a generic describe or look command that returns the number of ojbects and avatars around you which you can then iteratively invoke on their subsets to get more information.
The second solution is that we built in a more sophisticated pathfinding technique that assures that you go where you want to go without having to find this way yourself. Inherently when you use arrow keys you need to do the pathfinding yourself which is good for audio games as it helps with mental mapping of spaces. These spaces are typically small but Second life is vast and people build structures in the sky which makes mental mapping a lot harder. Also with pathfinding your avatar looks like any other avatar and visually impaired are not characterized by a lower mobility like in real life.
The first is that we use a summarizer that tries to synthesize information. It will cull non descriptive objects and also rank the objects based on their distance and name assuming that a longer name implies a more accurate description. We implemented a generic describe or look command that returns the number of ojbects and avatars around you which you can then iteratively invoke on their subsets to get more information.
The second solution is that we built in a more sophisticated pathfinding technique that assures that you go where you want to go without having to find this way yourself. Inherently when you use arrow keys you need to do the pathfinding yourself which is good for audio games as it helps with mental mapping of spaces. These spaces are typically small but Second life is vast and people build structures in the sky which makes mental mapping a lot harder. Also with pathfinding your avatar looks like any other avatar and visually impaired are not characterized by a lower mobility like in real life.
The first is that we use a summarizer that tries to synthesize information. It will cull non descriptive objects and also rank the objects based on their distance and name assuming that a longer name implies a more accurate description. We implemented a generic describe or look command that returns the number of ojbects and avatars around you which you can then iteratively invoke on their subsets to get more information.
The second solution is that we built in a more sophisticated pathfinding technique that assures that you go where you want to go without having to find this way yourself. Inherently when you use arrow keys you need to do the pathfinding yourself which is good for audio games as it helps with mental mapping of spaces. These spaces are typically small but Second life is vast and people build structures in the sky which makes mental mapping a lot harder. Also with pathfinding your avatar looks like any other avatar and visually impaired are not characterized by a lower mobility like in real life.
The first is that we use a summarizer that tries to synthesize information. It will cull non descriptive objects and also rank the objects based on their distance and name assuming that a longer name implies a more accurate description. We implemented a generic describe or look command that returns the number of ojbects and avatars around you which you can then iteratively invoke on their subsets to get more information.
The second solution is that we built in a more sophisticated pathfinding technique that assures that you go where you want to go without having to find this way yourself. Inherently when you use arrow keys you need to do the pathfinding yourself which is good for audio games as it helps with mental mapping of spaces. These spaces are typically small but Second life is vast and people build structures in the sky which makes mental mapping a lot harder. Also with pathfinding your avatar looks like any other avatar and visually impaired are not characterized by a lower mobility like in real life.
The first is that we use a summarizer that tries to synthesize information. It will cull non descriptive objects and also rank the objects based on their distance and name assuming that a longer name implies a more accurate description. We implemented a generic describe or look command that returns the number of ojbects and avatars around you which you can then iteratively invoke on their subsets to get more information.
The second solution is that we built in a more sophisticated pathfinding technique that assures that you go where you want to go without having to find this way yourself. Inherently when you use arrow keys you need to do the pathfinding yourself which is good for audio games as it helps with mental mapping of spaces. These spaces are typically small but Second life is vast and people build structures in the sky which makes mental mapping a lot harder. Also with pathfinding your avatar looks like any other avatar and visually impaired are not characterized by a lower mobility like in real life.
The first is that we use a summarizer that tries to synthesize information. It will cull non descriptive objects and also rank the objects based on their distance and name assuming that a longer name implies a more accurate description. We implemented a generic describe or look command that returns the number of ojbects and avatars around you which you can then iteratively invoke on their subsets to get more information.
The second solution is that we built in a more sophisticated pathfinding technique that assures that you go where you want to go without having to find this way yourself. Inherently when you use arrow keys you need to do the pathfinding yourself which is good for audio games as it helps with mental mapping of spaces. These spaces are typically small but Second life is vast and people build structures in the sky which makes mental mapping a lot harder. Also with pathfinding your avatar looks like any other avatar and visually impaired are not characterized by a lower mobility like in real life.
The first is that we use a summarizer that tries to synthesize information. It will cull non descriptive objects and also rank the objects based on their distance and name assuming that a longer name implies a more accurate description. We implemented a generic describe or look command that returns the number of ojbects and avatars around you which you can then iteratively invoke on their subsets to get more information.
The second solution is that we built in a more sophisticated pathfinding technique that assures that you go where you want to go without having to find this way yourself. Inherently when you use arrow keys you need to do the pathfinding yourself which is good for audio games as it helps with mental mapping of spaces. These spaces are typically small but Second life is vast and people build structures in the sky which makes mental mapping a lot harder. Also with pathfinding your avatar looks like any other avatar and visually impaired are not characterized by a lower mobility like in real life.
We are interested in its accessibility so can users can explore, communicate and interact with the same success rate as the SL Viewer. The beyond accessibility to efficiency principle states that accessible software must be more ambitious than just providing access therefore we evaluate the usability of textsl using nielsen’s usability attributed specifically whether users can explore, communicate and interact with the same learnability, efficiency, memorability, error rate and satisfaction as the SL viewer.
We ourselves are confident that the benefits of a command based approach will be evident once we add more object interaction functions and content creation functions.