silvereagle

Hello!

I’m Silver Eagle. I’m a furry, a web developer, and an accessibility advocate.

Today I wanted to talk to you about a specific problem I’ve been running into a lot lately with regard to accessibility. I get a lot of very polarized responses when I talk about this subject, so I thought I’d condense my thoughts into a post (available both in text form and video form) and just see what folks think.

Me, Accessibility and VR

The idea of building accessibility into the work I do was something I always knew about, but it really kicked into gear when I started working with a government agency, where building accessible websites wasn’t just nice to do, it was the law. I sat down and talked a lot with folks who needed special tools to browse the web, and it was clear to me that a lot of the web was just unnecessarily hostile to them. All that info was out there, but they just couldn’t get to it because the people building things didn’t think about them at all. This didn’t sit right with me, so I made it a point since then to make things I built accessible, and that includes the open-source software I build today, which I’m proud to say has a thriving community of visually-impaired users who felt abandoned by the other software out there and don’t have to feel that way anymore.

These days, for fun I like to spend a lot of time in Virtual Reality, or VR. It lets me spend time hanging out with friends around the world, experiencing things I wouldn’t normally get to, and it lets me be a cute bird on the Internet, so that’s cool, too!

One thing VR has reminded me of is how much I love the club scene. The thumping bass, the awesome DJs, the connections you make out on the dance floor. It’s really special, but in real life, these things are totally off limits to me. Why? Well, because I have photosensitive epilepsy. Long story short, that means that strobes mess me up. Strobes mess with a lot of people, actually, but for some of us it’s kind of a big deal.

Now, some of you might be hearing that and thinking, “Why the hell would you spend time in VR clubs if you’re sensitive to strobes? It’s not built for you! Go somewhere else!” which leads me right into my first point…

Let’s talk about ableism.

Ableism, Passive and Active

By definition, ableism is discrimination and prejudice against people with physical or mental disabilities, but I like to divide that further into two categories: “passive” ableism and “active” ableism. I want to go into each of these in the form of two stories that happened to me this year.

A few months back, a group I worked with put on a big DJ event in a brand new world. The world was beautiful, but it was lit entirely with a very flashy light system that filled your whole headset up, so every time a strobe hit, it was basically all you could see. This really messed with me, and kept me from enjoying the event.

I brought this up, only to be met with a chorus of moans and groans. It was a pretty hard technical problem to solve, and honestly…was it worth doing all that work? Were there even enough people there who it affected for it to matter? Ugh, what a pain in the ass to deal with, right?

This was a lot of what I’d call “passive” ableism: the fact that people with different needs had never crossed your mind at all until you met someone who was directly affected, and even then, you had all the arguments ready in your head for why it wasn’t worth the effort. It’s easier to justify inaction, because action is, well, harder.

Let’s just say a whole, whole lot of the world is passively ableist like that.

Now, to their credit, they did end up adding more and better settings to help people with photosensitivity have fun in the club, even if they didn’t much like me for advocating so hard for it. In fact, in the days after that event, one of the major stage lighting libraries in VR started shipping a strobe toggle directly into its default configuration panel, so this was really a win-win.

I thought that was the end of it, until this last weekend.

Another big event came up, and it was in a brand new world, and that world had strobes out the wazoo. It was bad. It messed with a lot of people who aren’t even normally susceptible to strobes. And yet, there wasn’t a setting to be found anywhere to turn them off. I had been really excited to attend this event, so it really crushed my spirits that I couldn’t enjoy it with my friends. I asked one of the event runners, who told me that the world was a little rushed, a little unfinished, and it just hadn’t crossed their minds to build that feature in yet. Eh, “That’s a bummer”, I thought…just a little more passive ableism, really, but I understand.

But then I got a DM from someone I know and trust. They told me, well, the story you’ve been told isn’t the whole story. In fact, in the middle of a crowded Discord voice call, the creator of this new world had been asked about whether they would include a strobe or lighting toggle, and their response was that it wasn’t a priority because the only person who would care about it was me, and “Silver complains too much.”

About seizures. Silver complains too much…about the danger of seizures in the worlds you’re building.

Now that…that is active ableism, when you know damn well that you’re excluding a group of people from what you’re creating, but you have such contempt for that group (or, in this case, an outspoken advocate within it) that you knowingly and intentionally say, “To hell with that whole group! Who needs ‘em?”

So…if you’ll pardon my language for a moment…that’s pretty fucked up.

Now, I’m not about to go naming this person on here, because the hostility from the folks defending him has already been off the charts. Some have accused me of making this story up wholesale (I didn’t, by the way), others have insisted that I have to separate the offhanded ableist comments of the world creator from the technical constraints of the world he created (which is an argument I’m not buying), and the creator himself, rather than address those comments head-on, instead decided to ban me from his events for speaking up.

Well, that last part’s not such a big loss. There was already something keeping me from attending those events…you know, THE SEIZURES.

But anyway, enough about that. I tell you those stories only to paint a picture here for you of the level and intensity of ableism that’s present in parts of this ecosystem.

As the saying goes, though, it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

So now I want to talk about ways that world creators can take steps to improve accessibility in the spaces they create.

Empathize

Okay, this is gonna sound cliche, but really, more than anything, the best thing you can do about accessibility is to start thinking about it at all. Start thinking about what things in your world may cause problems for people, think about the issues folks might run into. Test your world in challenging situations, with music with a high dynamic range and video feeds with lots of strobing effects. You may not know exactly what would trigger, say, a seizure, but I’ve found that lots of people have a good “vibe” for when levels are getting to be “a little much”.

Make the ideas of accessibility and inclusivity priorities in the worlds you build. After all, you’re creating on VR, a remarkably flexible and immersive platform that lets people experience things they’d never get to otherwise. Why constrain yourself to a select group of people experiencing your worlds?

If you’re worried that accessibility will hurt the experience for everyone else, don’t be. A majority of the things I’m discussing here involve tweaks that are client-side, so one player can get things exactly how they want them but another’s is entirely unaffected.

Once you’ve internalized that mindset, that accessibility brings your creations to a bigger audience, puts players in control of their experience and makes your spaces more enjoyable and safer to tons of folks, then you’re on the right track. The gears are turning in your head the whole time you’re building the world, and the results are much more likely to be inclusive as a result.

Stand on the shoulders of giants

I wanna start this part by saying that while I am a software developer, I’m not a VR world builder myself, so I don’t know every little detail about the process. I’m basing my advice here on what I’ve seen in existing worlds, and what worked well and what didn’t.

Sometimes the best way to do the job is not to have to do the job at all.

Rather than rolling your own lighting and audio systems from the ground up, look into using an existing one. There are really powerful systems out there that are largely free and open-source, and you benefit from a huge set of tools and prefabs that exist around them already.

Some popular ones I see around a lot are AudioLink and VR Stage Lighting, or VRSL. AudioLink is better known by players as that thing that lets your avatar glow pretty colors, but really it’s a toolkit for building reactive audio in general, and it is easily toggled on and off. VRSL offers the kind of DMX-driven professional stage lighting you’d see in real life events and is very powerful. As of April of this year, VRSL’s default configuration panel prefab includes not only global lighting toggles but a strobe-specific toggle button.

If you want to experiment with building your own custom systems, that’s cool too, as long as you’re building worlds in test environments. Remember, if it’s not accessible, it’s probably not shippable, so until you’ve built out a solution that is at least as accessible as the popular libraries out there, don’t go testing it out on major events.

Options, Options, Options

When it comes to letting players customize their experience in your world, any setting is better than no setting at all, but more settings are even better than that.

There’s a lot of overlap between personal preferences and accessibility on this front. A player might not be susceptible to flashing lights, but might prefer to have them off anyway, so they’d use a strobe toggle even though they’re not its “target audience”, per se.

Common adjustments I’ve seen in worlds include: – Global reactive lighting enable/disable (reactive lighting changes with audio, as opposed to static lighting in the world that doesn’t) – Strobe enable/disable (i.e. in VRSL) – AudioLink enable/disable – The ability to enable brighter ambient lights (reducing visual contrast) – Sliders for lighting intensity/brightness

Lighting is a Numbers Game

When it comes to whether your lighting is likely to cause photosensitive seizures or other discomfort, there are a few factors that come into play. There is no hard and fast rule on what will and won’t cause problems for players, because everyone is different, but that doesn’t mean you can’t tip the scales into your favor. If you do, you can make your world a lot more enjoyable even with the default settings.

One is of course the rate of strobing. Studies vary on the exact frequencies that cause problems, but regulations that apply to web sites advise you to not go between about 2 and 55 flashes per second (or 2-5 Hz). That’s a pretty big range, and it may not be possible to stay out of it completely, so you should use the other factors to mitigate this.

Another factor is the affected percentage of a player’s field of vision. In the real world, you can sometimes avoid a problem by just looking away from a strobing light source. Sometimes, though, if you’re in a dark room without many other light sources, the strobe will illuminate the floor, the ceiling and all the walls too, so no matter where you look, there’s trouble. This happens in VR too, and because the headset’s strapped to your head, sometimes the only way out is to just rip the thing off your head. No good!

Instead of making strobes fill a room, have them be smaller points of light that contribute less to the overall lighting of the room. Ensure the rest of the room isn’t so dimly lit or reflective that there’s nowhere a player can look to avoid the strobing effect. Even in the middle of the dance floor, people need somewhere they can look that isn’t visually overstimulating.

The last factor I want to talk about is visual contrast. In this case, that’s the difference between the darkest light in the range of reactive lighting and the brightest one. The bigger that gap is, the more likely it is that people will be affected. You see this a lot in clubs that are pitch black without the reactive lighting turned on. Out of nowhere, there’s a flash of bright white, and suddenly everyone’s headsets just spanned the full gamut of brightness in half a second. That’s gonna throw a lotta folks off. This is why, even though it’s not always popular in the club worlds, I’m a big fan of ambient lighting in event worlds. A fairly well-lit (albeit dim) world can have pretty dynamic lighting effects and still have much less visual contrast than starting from completely black would induce.

Audio Needs Love, Too

You may think that most of the focus on accessibility in VR clubs should be on the visual effects, and it’s certainly a big slice of it, but you can do little things to improve the accessibility of your audio, too.

For one, consider having “quiet spaces” scattered throughout your world. These would be places where the audio levels are lower and the visual lighting is subdued. Some worlds incorporate these as side rooms, cubbies, or even bathrooms. They’re great for people who get overstimulated to just relax for a moment, and also important for the occasional conversation that starts up.

Second, if you’re running an event with prerecorded audio, make sure the loudness levels between your performers are consistent. All too often, I’ll be in a club and a DJ set will come on that’s just way too quiet, so I turn everything up to accommodate, and sure enough, the next DJ blows out my headphones and nearly startles me out of my chair.

In the broadcasting world, the average loudness of audio is measured in a unit called LUFS, or Loudness Units relative to Full Scale. Different loudness levels are used in different places, but a lot of audio services settle somewhere between -14 and -10 LUFS as a good level. Ideally, as an event host, you could pick a loudness level and ask performers to master their recordings for that loudness level, but even if that doesn’t work for you, there are free and open-source tools (like Audacity for editing audio or master_me for live streaming) that let you pipe audio into them and get volume-normalized audio out.

A Missing Link: Strobing in Video

One thing you probably won’t have much control over in your world is what video gets played there. A lot of DJs like using visualizers in the video portion of their performances that strobe heavily or oscillate between dark and light quickly. Unlike the in-world lighting and strobes, though, right now there just isn’t a simple way to avoid strobing in the video feeds themselves.

To help with this, you can fall back to the other mitigating factors I mentioned above: reducing how much of the player’s field of vision is taken up by the video, how much it reflects off nearby surfaces, and how much it contrasts with the background of the world.

However, I have heard some exciting news that there are folks working on this exact issue. I hope to have an update on this soon that I can share with everyone.

Conclusion

I put this together to do two things: to point out what I see as a growing problem of certain creators pushing back against accessibility and those who fight for it, and to leave you with a few thoughts and some specifics that might help to inform the design of your own worlds.

I don’t mean to come across as an authority on either accessibility or VR world design. I admit, there’s a lot I don’t know about both subjects. I just hear stories all the time about how people are caught in a struggle between wanting to spend time with their friends and being unable to because of little things that get in the way of their enjoyment, and I try to put myself in their shoes and think of how to best accommodate them.

You don’t have to be living with a mental or physical disability yourself to empathize with people who do. And even if you should be, you may not be showered with praise for making sure to include as many people as possible in the experiences you build. But you can rest assured that you’re making a difference in someone’s life out there, and that’s really more than enough reason to do it.

Thank you for your time.