Towards an Inclusive and Accessible Metaverse

The push towards a Metaverse is growing, with companies such as Meta developing their own interpretation of what it should look like. The Metaverse at its conceptual core promises to remove boundaries and borders, becoming a decentralised entity for everyone to use - forming a digital virtual layer over our own “real” world. However, creation of a Metaverse or “new world” presents the opportunity to create one which is inclusive and accessible to all. This challenge is explored and discussed in this workshop, with an aim of understanding how to create a Metaverse which is open and inclusive to people with physical and intellectual disabilities, and how interactions can be designed in a way to minimise disadvantage. The key outcomes of this workshop outline new opportunities for improving accessibility in the Metaverse, methodologies for designing and evaluating accessibility, and key considerations for designing accessible Metaverse environments and interactions.

The Metaverse has the potential to bring the world much closer together through its network of connected virtual worlds and decentralised nature. Considering its potential to reach global appeal it is important to ensure that the Metaverse is accessible for people with physical and intellectual disabilities. This workshop intends to work towards a broad understanding of how the Metaverse can be designed in order to include people with physical and intellectual disabilities. To achieve this the workshop covers three core themes:

1. hardware and interaction

2. evaluating accessibility and prototyping

3. human factors and design considerations

We invite participants to submit maximum 4 page long position papers (in ACM CHI Publication Format), which address at least one of the key theme(s) of the workshop and must present original material. The paper should also include a statement on the potential goals of their research and the problem(s) it aims to address.

Note: Submissions should be non-anonymised, 4 pages double column, and references are excluded from the page limit.

Papers will be selected based on relevance, quality, and diversity. At least one author of each accepted position paper must attend the workshop, and all participants must register for both the workshop and for at least one day of the conference.