By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Published: 11th January 2007 Copyright Bloor Research © 2007

Second Life (SL), the popular virtual world, has just announced that the client code is now open source. See http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/01/08/embracing-the-inevitable/.

For anyone who has not tried SL, the client creates a visual representation of the part of the SL world you are visiting. This includes the general scenery and surroundings, other avatars who are in the area, and any objects that you can interact with. The client also enables you to move around the world, chat with the other avatars, create new objects and interact with objects. The client does not run in a browser, it runs in its own window, it does not use HTML to any great extent and therefore the Web Accessibility standards (WAI) are not sufficient and in some cases not relevant.

When I first tried SL it became clear to me that the client design meant that SL could not be accessed by some people with disabilities and so I wrote a blog 'Second Life class action'. The blog has generated a lively discussion and some flaming and a direct response from Linden Labs, all of which I appreciate. The intial issues I indentified were:

• Anyone that has a vision impairment and uses a screen reader to access a computer and the web can not access SL, because even the textual information displayed in the client is not accessible by the screen reader.
  
• Anyone who has a musculoskeletal impairment and can not, or prefers not, to use a mouse or other pointing device can not access large parts of SL. The latest version has added some more keyboard controls but I still get stuck if I do not use the mouse.
  

Making the client open source will enable contributors to modify the standard client or develop specialised clients. Speicalised clients might include a simplified interface to run on a PDA, or the just announced iPhone, or it could be a version for HDTV with a much more realistic rendering of the avatars and scenery.

Of course my interest is in making the client more accessible to people with disabilities, and this may mean enhancing the standard client, but it might also mean developing a new client that renders the information totally differently. I have a small list of suggestions below and I hope that this blog may generate a discussion of more ideas for making SL more accessible.

1. Include an accessibility section in the help.
2. Make the help screens accessible without a mouse.
3. Make the text in help sizable.
4. Make any text on the client configurable for size and color, including the menus, the avatar names, messages.
5. Enable the numbering of objects on the screen so that instead of having to click on an object you can choose the object by number (rather like the 'say what you see feature' in Vista).
6. A text-to-voice feature for chat, in stereo so that the avatars location can be estimated, and the ability to configure the voice to fit the avatar.
   
7. Provide a text list of avatars in the vicinity and voice announcements of entries and exits.
8. Simulation of an electronic white stick.
   

If anyone thinks any of this is too difficult can I suggest trying the Terraformers demo, which has all these ideas and more (thanks to Eelke Folmer for this suggestion).

I am afraid that I am not a developer so I do not think I could develop these extensions but I am happy to discuss further ideas through this blog or an SL blog.

Reader Comments

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11th January 2007: 'Henry Adamson' said:

Peter, I would like to syndicate the contents of your blog onto my accessibility portal. I have found a link to the summary feed, but would prefer the full content if possible.

Many thanks,
Henry

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11th January 2007: 'Web Master' said:

Henry, we do not offer a full RSS feed at present although if there is sufficient demand we will look at developing a solution.

Kind Regards
Miles

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12th January 2007: 'Bill Carter' said:

Those are some great ideas, Peter. I work in the IBM Human Ability and Accessibility Center and we are thinking along the same lines. The Second Life technology is relatively new so now is the time to implement accessible features. It would be much harder to retrofit it later.

There are some obvious things that could be added to the client side, especially now that its open source, which would help quite a bit and you have pointed out some of them. Here are a few more ideas that occurred to me, but some of them would require modifications to the server side as well.

1. Voice chat instead of text chat. Instead of tediously typing messages you would speak into a boom mike attached to a headset and be able to converse with nearby avatars who are within 'earshot'. This eliminates the 'I can't see the chat' problem and enhances everyone's experience. Audio compression technology is quite good these days, the bandwidth would be minimal. I have played games using third-party voice servers such as Teamspeak (http://www.goteamspeak.com/) and Ventrilo (http://www.ventrilo.com/), they work marvelously well. This should be incorporated into SL.

2. Text descriptions of user-created objects could be added as a feature of the build process. Then when you build something you have the option of embedding a written description for the benefit of the visually impaired. It could be as simple as 'a fountain' or 'a bench'. Could be as detailed as 'a 2-story building containing multiple shops with the following list of goods for sale...'. A text-to-speech engine would read these out to the user on demand. In fact, avatars could have this as part of their profile so that a blind person could determine if someone passing by might be interesting to talk to.

3. Be able to turn off the graphics and still play SL. If you are blind you don't need to have anything graphically rendered. This reduces the hardware requirements and thus makes it possible to use a cheaper machine to play. Also potentially reduces lag because nothing has to 'rez'. All a blind person's computer needs to know is the physical dimensions and position of the game objects plus the text description. If the server has a 'blind person' mode it wouldn't even have to stream out all that texture and prim data since its useless.

4. If you have 1 & 2 above then heck, you can even have a build methodology for the blind. A person could enter in some general information about the size and shape of something and then put in a great textual description. Or even record a verbal description that would play when you encounter the thing. Yes this would seem very peculiar to sighted people, which leads to...

5. Game areas which are designated as mainly for visually impaired people. None of it would look like much but the content would seem particularly rich to a blind person. This motivates them to participate and pretty soon you have a user experience that rivals the gamespace sighted people have created.

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15th January 2007: 'JackofSpades(SL)' said:

I would like to point out that a number of those features already exist in game, in the form of attachable gadgets. You just have to look for them. I have many radar systems that show me on screen, the names of avatars and how far away they are. And on the aspect of individual voices in SL, if we are going to take the time to implement text-to-voice for over 2 million accounts and make each one distinct then you might as well implement actual voice chat in SL. Also there is a way to increase all texts and GUIs inside of SL, not sure where exactly the option is nor what its called but I use it daily when I switch between full screen and windowed mode.

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19th January 2007: 'Bill Carter' said:

A gadget for identifying nearby avatars and saying their names might work for a sight-impaired person. In fact the 'gadget' model might be a viable way to improve usability for many forms of impairment. The benefit of that approach is that you get people creating these gadgets due to the economic incentive just like much of the other content in SL and sell the product to people who need it in the game for $L.

I know there's a chat font size and color selection in the preferences menu but I haven't seen anything for the other text sizes (menu text, etc). If its there somewhere can you post how to do it Jack?

About the many voices issue you mentioned; Personally I would prefer a VOIP-style chat system, not only because it benefits blind users but also it makes the whole environment enormously more useful for business purposes. As things currently stand you can have a business meeting in-world but with only text chat it is mainly a novelty. With voice chat it might actually be preferable to a conference call on the phone in many ways.

The server load probably goes up a fair amount with voice-chat however. I expect text-to-speech will be implemented sooner just because it is probably easier and requires no additional bandwidth or server capacity, you can do it all on the client side. I don't think it is neccessary for every avatar to have a unique voice. Modern TTS engines have several voices, you can just assign a different one to each person you are chatting with to help delineate them.

Incidentally, I downloaded the source code for the SL client the other day. It is 30MB of pretty hairy C++ code, it won't be a trivial job to modify it.

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23rd January 2007: 'Dave Roberts' said:

I'm glad to see discussion of the usability and accessibility of 3d spaces. I think many of the problems are derived from the roots of many of these systems as simulation and visualisation tools. Most of the interface has not made any concession to a broader audience.

In anticipation of this we did some work about 10 years ago on how you would make these places usable. At the time, the technology was not available to a broad audience so we shelved it. If anyone wants to read about it you can see our 'RealPlaces' guidelines at http://www-03.ibm.com/easy/page/580 .

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28th January 2007: 'Andrew LaHart' said:

There's definitely some forward thinking in that article Dave!

I wanted to add a thank you to Linden Labs for making the source code available (open source), which could drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to create some of the required accessibility fixes. The required fixes will still take some time to plan and prioritize, but I firmly believe that they eventually will be implemented. The population of people with disabilities is simply too large to ignore.

Building off of Bill's #2 above, one way to create a more accessible SL is allow any resident to add a text description to ANY object, even if it isn't theirs. This way, if the content owner hasn't added the description, someone else could. This would help to create an army of volunteers to roam the world and "tag" everything they see. Of course, before the description is officially part of the object,the object owner would have to give his/her approval. A similar concept can be found at the opencaptions website.


Great blog Peter!

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23rd March 2007: 'Sal Congrejo (SL)' said:

Excellent suggestions. Now, is anyone actively working on this?

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