Developing an Accessible Client for Second life

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Second Life is a massive multiplayer online game (virtual world) that can potentially offer an environment for social interactions regardless of disabilities, gender, race or age. However, at the present time people who are unable to see or unable to use a mouse miss out on this unique experience, though it could benefit them the most. Second Life currently has more than 6 million "residents" and is growing fast. Although there are certainly ethical, legal and financial justifications for developing an accessible client to this environment, the PI's goal is to improve the quality of life for millions of people in the United States with disabilities of the types mentioned above. In this exploratory project, he will develop a prototype client for Second Life that offers a basic level of accessibility, and which will allow him to assess the feasibility of and technical requirements for a client that is fully accessible to blind players. The prototype client will initially allow blind players to navigate the environment using voice commands alone; it will then be enhanced and extended, as time and resources allow, so as to enable these players to interact in meaningful ways with other players. Achieving these objectives is not straightforward, because the client and server of Second Life have only recently been made open source and no one has yet attempted to create an accessible client for the environment. The PI has identified a number of issues that need to be investigated and resolved, including how to extract relevant information from the environment in order to provide meaningful output. This funding will allow the PI to explore alternative strategies in this regard, and also to run accessibility studies with the basic client in order to identify other problems. The open source community is slowly starting to add new features to Second Life; the PI's experience with the basic client may allow him to make timely recommendations (e.g., objects descriptions may need to be much richer than they are now, to better accommodate an accessible client). Broader Impacts: The technology developed in this project can be leveraged to other massive multiplayer online games (such as the popular World of Warcraft), not to mention games in general. Voice navigation can make first person shooters or 3D adventure games accessible to physically disabled players. The PI will take advantage of his experiences in this project to contribute to the formulation of accessibility guidelines for games, similar in spirit to those developed by the W3C for websites, which will enable future games to be developed in an inclusive way for the benefit of all members of society.