Designing the right accessibility features for the virtual courtroom – Part One

In this blog piece Open University User Experience Designer Anna Chistyakova writes about the steps being taken to ensure that the right accessibility features are built into the development of the virtual courtroom.

Virtual reality (VR) courtrooms, once confined to science fiction, now stand at the forefront of technological innovation, promising to transform the traditional courtroom experience. By moving into a virtual space, courts may enable participants to engage in a more immersive, efficient, and accessible experience. As the technology behind VR matures, it is easy to be carried away with what it can do. However, it is important to focus our attention on what it should do and how we can ensure it is accessible. How easy is it to ensure that the right accessibility features within VR courtroom are built in? Here is how we answered this question.

At the Open University accessibility and inclusivity is central to our mission. The OU adheres to international accessibility standards and has a rich experience of employing inclusive design principles in the development of our online learning environments and course materials. Therefore, accessibility was a key part of the virtual courtroom design process. However, that doesn’t guarantee that we have all the answers.

Consulting with global accessibility guidelines

Looking at the accessibility guidelines produced by Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) was the first step for ensuring VCR is accessible. However, the standards are very broad, covering a wide range of application for technology, and not all of them are applicable to the virtual courtroom.

The technologies we used to create our virtual courtroom are evolving rapidly, constantly pushing the boundaries of what is possible. The word “virtual” may confuse the reader by implying the use of headsets and other devices. But our virtual courtroom is a computer-generated environment that works on desktop and only requires a computer, a keyboard and a mouse to interact.

At the same time, the guidelines mentioned above are often designed for XR (extended reality) technologies, which are quite broad and may not fully align with the specific features and uses of the virtual courtroom. In addition, the process of developing and approving the standards and guidelines is a meticulous and lengthy process ranging from a few months to several years.

Rich variety of approaches to accessibility on the market

To ensure that we adopted a comprehensive approach to accessibility, we also explored the latest innovations in XR and VR accessibility by looking at the real products and platforms that the leading tech and gaming companies offer. We compared how large gaming firms (such as Sony, Microsoft, Tencent, and Nintendo) and big tech giants (like Meta, Microsoft again, Apple, and Google) incorporate accessibility features into their products hoping to see some trends and best practices. We discovered that each company has its own way to make their products more inclusive.

The justification and success of their approach is influenced by many factors, such as  a lack of standardisation on reporting or listing of accessibility features, fast-paced innovation in the industry, and different market priorities. The approach may vary even within one company, where a particular type of accessibility feature may be implemented in particular products and not in others.

However, when we compared the accessibility features of the leading tech and gaming companies, we clearly saw commonalities in their lists of accessibility features that also correspond with international guidelines. These are:

• Audio Adjustments: Features like audio balance, mono sound, and volume control are common. These cater for users with hearing impairments.
• Visual Adjustments: Colour correction, high-contrast display options, and text size adjustments are offered to aid users with visual impairments.
• Customizable Controls: The ability to re-map controls or use gesture-based controls allows users with mobility or motor impairments to interact more easily with devices.
• Real-time Captions and Transcriptions: Live captions for speech, audio, and video content are essential for users who are deaf or hard of hearing, and also benefit users in a noisy environment.
• Voice Control and Dictation: Voice commands and dictation features assist users with physical disabilities, as well as those with dyslexia or other cognitive differences.

Raising the bar for educational platforms used for VR

To make our understanding of the current landscape of VR/XR accessibility even more comprehensive, we have looked at the leading VR/XR platforms where users can create and enter these environments to interact, play, learn, or collaborate. Below is a comparison of accessibility features present in various learning-orientated products, and in the last column, demonstrates the features present in the virtual courtroom.

Existing educational platforms that we have compared set certain expectations among users for quality, performance, and user experience. We strive to exceed these benchmarks.

Feature	Roblox	Somnium Space	Spacial	FrameVR	Labster	Mozilla Hubs	Metaverse Learn	Microsoft Mesh for Teams	EngageXR	Sim Framework (VCR)
Mouse only controls	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Keyboard only controls	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes
Keyboard navigable UI	Yes		Yes	Yes		Yes				Yes
User adjustable contrast	Yes							Yes		Yes
User adjustable movement speed						Yes				Yes
User adjustable colours								Yes		Yes
User adjustable motion reduction	Yes
Contrasting text		Yes	Yes	Yes		Yes		Yes		Yes
Remappable controls										Yes
Voiceover for onscreen text					Yes			Yes		Yes
Voiceover for UI navigation	Yes					Yes
Gamepad Support									Yes	Yes

Always listening to the end user

Even though our virtual courtroom benchmarks well against other similar products on the market, we strive to go further. When deciding on what accessibility features to implement, we go beyond running competitive analysis and following accessibility standards.

The OU actively seeks feedback from students and staff about the accessibility of all its products and materials. This feedback is used to drive continuous improvements and ensure that accessibility remains a key consideration in all developments. This is why the user testing part of the development is integral to our design process! The virtual courtroom has evolved because we conducted  several user testing sessions before actually using the technology as a learning tool with our students. We also listened closely to the feedback, and made further improvements based on it.

We are continuing to work towards making our virtual courtroom easy for everyone to use, no matter what their needs. But there is a question around whether having all these features in place would make the courtroom entirely accessible – we will try to answer this question in our next blog post by looking at accessibility in terms of availability and technological proficiency. Stay tuned.