Introducing the XR Association’s Developers Guide on Accessibility | Accessibility VR Meetup Recap

Laura Chadwick Hello, everyone, it's so great to be here with you today. So, as Thomas said, I am going to walk you through our developers guide that we released last October. But I'm first going to start off talking about giving you an introduction about the XR Association, a relatively new entity out in the XR ecosystem. So, I'd love to talk you through who we are, what do we care about, what do we do, and then do a deep dive into our developers guide.

And then, I'd like to share with you an exciting announcement just made today about the evolution of our developers guide, a brand new resource that I hope you guys will enjoy, find useful, and also contribute to moving forward. So, without.. Next slide. Oh, I am duty bound to let all of you know that we have a free newsletter that is a roundup of news articles from every week about what's going on in the XR industry.

As part of this free newsletter, you also get news about what's going on the XR Association. It's simply the best way to keep up to date with us, and so I want to encourage all of you to head on over to xra.org/subscribe to sign up for our newsletter. There you will find lots of resources, or you'll get every Tuesday published a newsletter about what's going on XRA. But so, the XR Association, we have been around in a loose form for the last five years.

We -- about three years ago, the XR Association, our executive members, the headset manufacturers, formalized the group known as the XR Association today. Our mission at the XR Association is in the promotion of the responsible development and thoughtful advancement of XR technology all focus on those positive societal outcomes. I tell people -- I share with people, when I'm talking about the XR Association that our organization is in response to what had occurred in computing and mobile phone platforms when those technologies were brought to market.

And I think all of us can agree that, when those new innovations were launched, that there were some huge blind spots in the technology, there were some areas that absolutelywe needed, and there were areas that required the manufacturers, the developers, to go backwards and rethink. The XR association is an attempt to learn our lesson. It is our attempt to, from the get go, begin to look at those areas that need work and bring together the industry to solve those problems.

All of this is very much infused with our vision, our technology will bring about societal change in value for everybody. So, that being said, as new as we are, we are still your traditional trade association, so you have member companies, we're very interested in supporting industry networking and collaboration, and very invested in making sure our member companies are succeeding in this space. As I mentioned, we were founded by the headset manufacturers, these folks still make up our executive committee, includes Google, Microsoft, Oculus, and Facebook, Sony Interactive, and Vive.

This has not been announced yet, but we will be adding Unity and Accenture to this list, and then we're also welcoming Qualcomm into the membership. How do we deliver on membership value?. This is core of our work, these three pillars, community, leadership, and advocacy. So, we bring the community together, and then we look out into the horizon and try to identify those areas where the XR industry is going to need help and support and solutions.

And so, we're bringing the community together, and then we're putting them to work to help us solve these issues. And that's what we put under our leadership category. And then, finally, we are out there educating policymakers about the XR industry and the promise that it holds. We're the only trade association in the XR space who is having these conversations with policymakers, and it's not just here on the federal level here in Washington DC, but it is also down to the state and local level, as well as to European Commission and, once the pandemic is finally over, we will also be convening with policymakers in Asia.

So, under our community pillar, we are pulling together the industry. We have three standing committees, Health & Inclusion, Policy, and Communication. Our Health & Inclusion Committee is our largest committee that's where you bring together product councils, safety engineers, standards experts, accessibility experts, to come together to begin to look at industry issues. The Health & Inclusion Committee in upon itself is looking at cyber sickness in VR.

This has emerged as an issue from enterprise use of the technology. I know I feel like I see it every day mentioned on Twitter, you hear from researchers, they've even been using terms like VR sickness to describe that set of symptoms that may occur through the use of virtual reality. We are trying to rethink, how can we talk about this, this phenomenon? What is the right term to describe it? we will be coming out with a statement fairly soon that makes the case that visually induced motion sickness is actually the better term of art to describe the citizens and visually induced motion sickness, or VIMS, actually occurs in a variety of different contexts, beyond virtual reality.

It happens when you're on a bus or on an airplane where your body thinks that it's moving, but it actually isn't. And putting that into context with these other content, under our H&I Committee is our Accessibility Working Group. Our Accessibility Working Group is made up of those accessibility experts. We have some luminaries on that group, perhaps you guys are familiar with them, Mike Shebanek from Facebook is a very active member, we have Christopher Patnoe as well as a member, and these are the folks who drive our accessibility work at the XR Association, including the developers guide that I will walk through in a number of slides, as well as our new announcements about our evolution of our guide.

We also have a Standards Working Group, and that is a group of standards experts who are monitoring standardization efforts here in the United States. Underwriters Laboratories, UL, is working on a normative safety standard, as is the British Standards Institute, as well as efforts ongoing in Europe or, excuse me, in Asia, and we monitor those on behalf of our members, we represent the views of the XR industry and provide that as a value to our members.

I'm sure you can imagine, under our Policy Committee, that's where we work on our policy agenda. That's where we're plotting our outreach to members of Congress, regulators, what have you and letting them know about XR technology? How does it work? What are the different contexts in which it is used?

Why XR is superior technology, so on and so forth. Underneath our policy committee, we have a Privacy Principles Working Group. As we know that XR technology generates a lot of additional data points that are beyond what all of us understand come from computing and mobile phone platforms, and so what can we as the industry trade association, organize the industry to come up with a set of principles that guide how we talk about privacy, not only out to end users, but to policymakers as well?

Lastly, in our Communications Committee, that's made up of communications professionals at our member companies. These are people who are interested in promoting the industry writ large through media and other channels. We also offer our member companies an online portal, it's LinkedIn for just our members. And then we're out in the field, like I am tonight, talking about the XR Association, what we do, our members.

We put on our own events, and then we were at the XR Access Symposium, I presented at RightsCon, we'll be at AWE, and we have previously been at South by SouthWest, and M-Enabling. What we love to do there is talk about us, and then also bring our member companies up there to demonstrate the sort of work that they are focused on. So, as far as our leadership category, and where we'll be going in depth here, is on XRA's Developers Guide.

So, this is how we've been demonstrating our leadership, bringing together the ecosystem to develop resources for developers. we've had three chapters, our first chapter focused on how to design XR with physical and psychological safety in mind. Our second chapter was again geared towards the developer audience about how to create safe online spaces for those multiplayer in software, including how to create a code of conduct, how can we make sure that users feel safe in a virtual reality environment?

And then, our last chapter, as I mentioned, released last October was an in depth look at XR accessibility. Not only, though, why this is important, and how this shows up in XR environments, but also a great list of best practices about how to include accessibility into your XR software. In addition to our developers guide, we also do market and academic research. On November 4, we will be putting out a piece of research.

We asked you 150 HR and learning and development professionals, what do they think about XR technology? How are they using it for their training and development and upskilling of their employees? And how are they going to use it in the future? We also did a great report with a European partner, a well regarded economic research firm based in Brussels, talking about XR in Europe, and making predictions about the growth of the technology there.

And then we do discrete research projects as well, pure scientific research projects, working with Exponent Labs, specific researches about the impact of XR on kids, just 10 to 12. Laura Chadwick We have a number of partnerships in our leadership category as well, this list is not complete, but is in it two most important ones. We have partnership with the Bipartisan Policy Center. Next year, they will be putting out a paper with us, one that summarizes the research they've been doing this year about XR and how it's been contemplated or not in federal law.

What in US federal law needs to change in order to support the continued growth of the XR industry? So, we will get a list of recommendations from them. As you can imagine, the Bipartisan Policy Center is neither Republican or Democrat, it's that middle of the road. So, we're really excited to hear about what their thoughts are.

And we have also an alliance with the XR Access Initiative, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with. We meet on a quarterly basis to hear, to build trust and knowledge between our two organizations, and this evolution that I have in previewing for you guys was a joint partnership with them, and we have other projects in in plans to execute the beginning next year to support further work in XR accessibility.

So, in our policy priorities, as I mentioned, we're the only organization out there talking to policymakers about technology. Just a quick story on the importance of advocacy. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, he introduced a piece of legislation called the Endless Frontier Act, getting in Congress last January. This piece of legislation was geared towards countering the influence and the funding that China is putting into its own homegrown tech industry.

This bill would provide 250 billion additional dollars for research and development to the National Science Foundation. In this bill, it listed 10 core technologies that would be the beneficiary of this new $250 billion. Immersive technology was not on the list, and it was only through XRA's direct advocacy did we get immersive technology added to the list before the bill was passed by the US Senate. The bill is now over at the US House.

President Biden has already indicated his interest in signing this bill. And so, when it is signed into [law], our industry will benefit from this extra National Science Foundation money. So, that's a great example of why we do advocacy. This money will help our industry continue to grow and develop.

So, we provide a variety of resources out to our members, community planner, we have a CEO report as well. And this is an addition to our XRA Alert, and you can keep up with all of our news, again, through the XRA Alert newsletter. I just wanted to also share that we have -- I mentioned how we were founded by the headset manufacturers, formally. About three years ago our CEO Liz Simon was brought on about two years ago, I've been employee number two for the last 19 months.

But, as of January this past year, we've expanded our membership beyond just the headset manufacturers, we now include component and peripheral manufacturers and developers, we include Internet infrastructure companies, those companies that will make 5G a reality, which should be a turning point for the use of our technology, enterprise solution providers, people who are working with companies developing XR technologies, perhaps many of you are involved in that sort of work, and then the enterprise end users themselves.

We have a small category for XR developers who want to join, who want to receive our newsletters and our research, but not get involved on our committees. So, if you are interested in these do send us a note. You could go to xra.org/joinus to learn more about XRA membership, and fill out a form which will then come to me, and then we will be in touch about setting up a meeting so we can talk more about this.

And then lastly, our last new category is XRA Allied Members, these are organizations that support the growth of the XR industry, but aren't actually doing XR technology. A great example of that we've just brought on WXR that's a venture capital fund geared towards women XR founders. With that, and last before I get into pure accessibility, I wanted to share with you our event that we have upcoming. This is our first inaugural event that we are doing here at the XR Association.

It's the Limitless Future Conference: XR for Learning and Development. This is a conference that brings together the XR industry with HR and learning and development professionals. We've brought on a number of partners to help support us grow that audience. We have observed that there's tons of XR conferences out there, you know tech talking to other XR tech, EWTS is a great example of bringing the industry together.

And then, we know there are lots of HR and learning and development conferences out there who are not talking about XR. So, our event Limitless Future Conference that we're holding on November is bringing together those two audiences. I always say "Hashtag Thanks COVID" on this event, or "Hashtag, thanks delta variant". This event originally was supposed to be in person, we are holding it online.

We were planning, fingers crossed, to hold this event in person, but again, this is where we're bringing the enterprise solution providers together with HR audience to talk about how you can use XR for learning and development of your employees and upskilling, and the like. We've got a great lineup, and I hope you guys would go and check that out. Thank you, Thomas, for including the link to our conference. So, from there...

As I mentioned, we have some great partners. And then, let's get into the Developers Guide. As I mentioned, this is part of our leadership work, and two other chapters that we've done previously, but as of October last year, we released our Chapters 3, Accessibility and Inclusive Design and Immersive Experiences. This chapter was written by our Accessibility Working Group.

We brought the industry together, we asked them where should we begin, and we set pen to paper to write out this resource. So, as I mentioned, it's a baseline of best practices, it is not the end all be all, but again, it walks the reader through the the why accessibility is important, and then the how you should go about doing that. We not only worked with XRA member companies, but we also partnered with the the XR Access Initiative and a number of other organizations, including AbleGamers, Games for Change, and a few independent individuals who are also familiar with XR accessibility.

I do also want to mention that that resource was a snapshot in time. As soon as -- I'm sure everyone knows -- as soon as you write a PDF and put it on the Internet, it is out of date, our evolution, that I will announce in a few moments here, is an attempt to keep that resource up to date. But, you will find within the document -- which is online -- you will find, again, a great narrative about why XR accessibility is so important, and why developers should care about this, and how to go about doing that.

We also included this great quick reference table that charts of the five different -- the five major disability categories against these best practices, showing where these best practices can be useful across the different categories. So, we also have some other key recommendations that track in those five categories that, again, provide guidance on how to approach this. Not everybody obviously is a member of this group, and as plugged in, so we wanted to make sure that you were explaining from the very beginning, from a baseline all the way to the sophisticated developer who already is well versed in these solutions -- I'm so sorry -- this guidance, these best practices.

So, as you can see, we go from general accessibility to visual, auditory, mobility, and cognitive, as well. The guide itself, as I mentioned, is on our website, we can toggle over there to check it out. Apologies for the gate, but we really want to understand who is coming, and who is using that, and we can continue to communicate with those who are downloading it. Once you fill out that form in order to access the guide, it will be emailed to you, and kept in your inbox, for easy reading.

As I mentioned, I've been promoting it throughout my talk here, this evolution. And so we have worked with the XR Access initiative over the last several months about creating a online resource, a living breathing index, every piece of XR accessibility research guidance, code base, what have you, and putting it all in one place, and we're calling this the XRAccessibility project, and then it's housed on GitHub. Right now, what we have, and if you were to toggle over to the GitHub site you will see that this is brought to you by the XR Association in partnership with the XR Access Initiative, and as we go through it, you can see that we have delivered a number of different resources by XR software development platform.

And it is our hope -- we have pre-seeded this list with as many resources that we can get -- you will see the XRA Developer's Guide, you will see XR Access's materials, you'll see accessibility VR resources developed by this group and others already on the page. What I think is truly extraordinary is that, and the real thinking behind this phase -- we want to keep this up to date -- is a submission form.

So, we are asking people who are involved in XR accessibility, who are thoughtful about this, you understand what's at stake here, and perhaps know about resources that we ourselves don't know about, would consider contributing those to be added to our list in our GitHub site. One of the top links is a link to our Google form, submission form, for you and others to make contributions to our list, and that's the way that we are going to keep this up to date.

And it is our hope over time to begin to build a community here. And then to also enable other aspects of GitHub, using the real the real guts of GitHub in order to develop additional code bases, to highlight other people's work, and so on. And so I wanted to just pause there for a moment, just to see if anyone had any questions about the GitHub, or any feedback about it initially. If not, take a look at it, we'd love to hear from you.

You can reach me, you can reach out... Awesome, thank you so much. You can also reach out to Thomas, who was very much a big help on developing this resource, as was Dylan Fox over at XR Access initiative. Again, as I mentioned, we really want this to be living and breathing, the place where people regularly go, and the only way that we're going to be able to do that is through folks like you who are spreading the word about this, you are making submissions, you are continuing to use this as a resource.

So, asking to enlist all of you in helping us share that message about this new resource. Oh, hi Dylan, thank you so much. So I also, in my final moments -- I also want to talk about a few more accessibility focus resources that we have -- a few more resources that we have developed as well, focused on XR and accessibility. We partnered with PEAT, Partnership on Employment & Assistive Technology out of the US Department of Labor, Bill Curtis-Davidson, in his great work over there, we partnered with to create this new white paper that is really focused on those HR and learning development audiences, to tell them about how to, as they are pursuing XR for their learning and development HR use cases, and around the company, frankly, that they need to think through about making sure

that the technology is inclusive, and this white paper that is also available up on XRA's website, and as well as through PEAT's channels, that makes the case, explains to them, gives them direction, about how to go about doing that. I'm excited to announce that PEAT will be at XRA's Limitless Future conference in a breakout session, leading conversations with our HR and L&D professionals who are coming to the event about the PEAT paper, and also about how to make their XR training modules accessible, and Meryl will be coming to be one of our speakers there, so we're so glad to have her as well.

Again, I'm going to go back to my xra.org/subscribe, it's the best way for you to keep up to date with what's going on at the XR Association, and all these new resources that we have developed, not only on XR accessibility, but... And then I wanted to close with any questions or answers on XRA, the work that we do, how you guys can get involved, and especially on our work in accessibility. Thomas Logan Thank you so much, Laura.

That's an awesome overview. We have several chats on the YouTube stream as well, just saying it's great to see this coming together, and definitely feels like a move forward, and the next step in making progress here on the topic we all care about. It sounds like on the stream people are very excited to see this launch, and we will also at our meetup be continuing to share the link for contributing the resources.

Every time we have different people that come to this event. So, we love meeting new people. Many of you all here today, if you're working on anything in this space, we'd love to help highlight your work via this mechanism and, yeah, here at this event, so we're very excited to really see this coming together more. First question for you Laura that was a -- we had a question on the YouTube stream related to the vestibular sickness and it was related to, if there's a difference between -- is there as much of an effect on motion sickness in the realm of AR as there is in VR?

I would think not, but a lot of experiences beyond Pokemon Go, VR aggravates people who have vestibular disorders and migraines. It's not necessarily unique to VR, but just, is there any discussion in the group with VR versus AR and vestibular? Laura Chadwick Yes, that's that is a great point, we have been focused on virtual reality. That's where we're hearing the most churn about it.

There has been some studies, frankly, the Consumer Product Safety Commission has been spending some time talking about AR and VIMS. But we have -- we've run this out with our member companies, they have found that the research is lacking depth and needs more investigation. So, to put it short, you know, to sum it up, we are focused on VR, we're not seeing this as much in AR, but we continue to investigate it.

I am not the definitive source on the science behind this. My colleague, Stephanie Montgomery, also runs our Standards Working Group is the expert on this. Whoever's asked this question, I do encourage you to reach out, and I'd love -- to me, [email protected] -- I'd love to introduce you to Stephanie, and our team who's working on that particular piece of it. Yeah, thank you for that.

I had a question related to, you mentioned the working with a Bipartisan Policy Center, and the legal consideration. As far as what's happened to date, has there been a generally open accepting XR tech is something that needs to fit into the other technologies that are currently regulated? Are there dissenting views, or has there been issues? Like, what's been maybe argued?

Or, if there has been things that have been argued in this space? Yeah. So, these conversations, there's been a kickoff public event, and then there have been private conversations, closed where we've brought in -- the Bipartisan Policy Center has brought in issue experts to talk through. Bipartisan Policy Center will be holding a public meeting in November focused on the end users and their use of XR technology.

We will be sharing through the XRA alert about how people can attend that public meeting, to talk about, to hear about, how it's being used in an enterprise use case and smart cities and the like. But, I can share with you that a lot of the conversation has been focused around cybersecurity and privacy, also human workers rights, when it comes to the use of the technology, and there are some existing legal frameworks.

But, other topics that have emerged is -- and perhaps we're seeing this in other places about mental privacy, that XR technology, perhaps, provides a snapshot, and a deeper snapshot, into a user, and then who who has the rights to that information that can be gleaned. It's really cutting edge sci-fi stuff, but the thinking is that we want to surface these questions, we need to ask them and to think through how does federal law consider these topics today, and how should it consider it in the future?

We're always very much pro-innovation, right? How can we make sure that the law supports innovation, while also making sure that user's privacy and their mental privacy is being protected? So, it should be a really interesting and compelling report that's coming out, as I mentioned, next year, probably in the March / April timeframe. Yes I have that thought when I put on my headset pretty much every time, thinking about the privacy aspects, and it's great to hear that it's being discussed at that level, and people are not waiting many years down the line to have the discussions.

I want to open it up to the folks here in the room. Does anyone have a question? You can either type into chat, or go on voice and we're happy to have you on. Everybody's writing.

I just want to -- just one final feedback. That is, our work with the Bipartisan Policy Center, it's very much in in vein with our mission, the thoughtful advancement and responsible developments, responsible advancement. Sorry again, but you get my mission. Responsible advancement and responsible development of the technology.

that we at the XR Association, we are certainly supportive of the industry, we want to see the industry grow, but we -- it's part of our DNA here is to ask the hard questions about the technology, again, to prepare us for the future. We are not just cheerleaders for it but, again, we're asking these hard questions in order to prepare the industry to, again, lean into our community, bringing the industry together in our leadership work, and to create solutions to these problems, and then telling our policymakers about how the industry is responding, how are we going to take care of this, and then we very much imagine that we will partner with government in order to create a legal framework that enables, again, the future growth of our technology.

Thomas Logan We've got a comment from YouTube also: Love to talk, super excited about what XRA does. Any research, or cases being worked, on hybrid XR tech, such as WebXR, that is often combining non-XR and XR users together, I guess what we're in today with hubs. Laura Chadwick At this time, we haven't delved into WebXR. As I mentioned, I am employee number two, we have three more colleagues, but we are very much geared to expand next year, and we are definitely looking at AR and WebXR as areas of growth in inquiry for us.

We certainly can't tell the full story of the XR industry just focusing on virtual and augmented reality, so that is definitely in our game plan, our map for the future. Thomas Logan Excellent. Thank you. All right, one more time for anyone else here in the room.

Any questions, feel free to put into the chat or go off of mute? Dylan Fox Hey, Laura, this is Dylan over here. Laura Chadwick Hi, Dylan Dylan Fox Can you hear me alright? Laura Chadwick I can.

Dylan Fox Awesome. I would just love to have you tell us more about -- you mentioned that in the policy, that [inaudible] NSF grants to become, you know, eligible for XR related topics. And I think it's a it's really hard to see a lot of the time, especially from West Coast, how to change the things that are happening on federal levels, can directly affect some of the development, the lives of kind of designers, developers and users.

I'd love if you could just talk a little bit more about that work, about how it affects the lives of the people who might listen to this meetup. Laura Chadwick Sure. So just to -- just like the volume was coming in / out, like the impact of federal policy on the growth of our industry, is that generally, is that right? Dylan Fox Yeah.

And how resources for it can come from there to here? Laura Chadwick Yeah, so I think writ large this is where our trade associations are so great, is to interface and educate members of Congress about new technologies. I'm always -- I'm a former lobbyist myself, I worked on Capitol Hill for seven years, and so know it from the other side of the equation, that our policies, and how we approach the tech sector, have a big impact on how -- members of Congress, their constituency, are our fellow citizens, the users of the technology, and there is an ongoing, perhaps you guys are familiar with this idea of a techlash here in Washington DC, that technology is on trial among policymakers and the like.

For XR technology, it was relatively new, people don't know it, don't understand it. That is the perfect recipe for misunderstanding about our technology, to automatically within this environment, this negative environment among policymakers about technology, to introduce a new technology, and it can quickly fall under this frame that this technology, therefore is bad. Just the general, introducing the technology, talking about its use cases, especially in that HR learning and development theme, how we're going to get people back to work after the pandemic, how can we get people who are wishing to change careers skilled up, how can we get folks who perhaps are from marginalized groups who haven't enjoyed the benefits of traditional education, or don't have a four year college education, how can we get them skilled up fast into jobs, to achieve President Biden's vision of a Build Back Better agenda?

We can do that through XR, but where we stand right now, or what we're working on, is to educate members of Congress about why that is so important. So, when this techlash, this negative idea about the technology, threatens to overwhelm the tech industry, largely we can still have those advocates for our technology being out there. Laura Chadwick An important way that we do that is we work closely with the -- call it the Reality Caucus.

For those who aren't familiar with, Capitol Hill is filled with these caucuses, they are like clubs for members of Congress. The congressman who I worked for represented Napa, so he led the Wine Caucus, a very popular caucus of exuberant winemakers there. The Reality Caucus does exactly that for virtual reality and augmented reality, it is run by Congresswoman Susan DelBene, she's one of the founders, Washington State, former Microsoft executive, Congresswoman Yvette Clarke from Washington State, or excuse me, from New York, Brooklyn area, that great part of Brooklyn that is really tech forward, and a few others who are involved in making sure that XR technology is part of the conversation, and part of the national conversation, in a positive light.

So, we partner with them, we try to help grow their ranks. If you go to xra.org/xractioncenter, right now we have a grassroots alert, where each member of the XR industry can freely go onto this platform, and write their own member of Congress a letter about encouraging them to join the Reality Caucus. And so, we work with them on growing their caucus, getting more people, more members of Congress involved, and then we partner with them to provide -- to give them research, and bring interesting speakers to light to, again, to begin to tell that story about the XR industry.

And, as I mentioned, the XR Association is the only one who's out doing this work, and it's an important part of growing our industry, not only to change the laws, but also to make sure that the understanding of our technology, and the policy makers get it and will be there for us advocating for its growth, as well. Thomas Logan Thank you, Laura, so much. I'd love to make a request for you, in the chat, to give us the link for the -- oh, we have it -- to do the advocacy, but it's so great, and I definitely can attest, knew nothing about the Reality Caucus.

Joly: Yay, Yvette Clarke. So, that's very cool to know that's happening in DC. Laura Chadwick Yeah. Thomas Logan And that definitely sounds like, yeah, that's awesome to know that's happening.

We want to end here on our stream. If you all want to stay around, we'll be in the room here for a little bit longer. But we want to thank first and foremost our presenter tonight, Laurie Chadwick from XRA, thank you so much for the excellent presentation and introduction to what's happening right now. So thank you so much.

Laura Chadwick Thank you so much everyone for joining.