Developing an Accessible Client for Second life

为第二次生命开发无障碍客户端

• 批准号: 0738921
• 负责人: Eelke Folmer
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Board of Regents, NSHE, obo University of Nevada, Reno
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2007-08-01 至 2009-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0738921&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Developing; Accessible; Client; Second; life

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.

第二人生是一个大型多人在线游戏（虚拟世界），可以提供一个社会互动的环境，无论残疾，性别，种族或年龄。 然而，目前，那些看不见或不会使用鼠标的人错过了这种独特的体验，尽管它对他们的好处最大。 第二人生目前有超过600万“居民”，并正在快速增长。 虽然肯定有道德，法律的和财政的理由来开发一个无障碍的客户端到这个环境中，PI的目标是提高生活质量的数百万人在美国与上述类型的残疾人。 在这个探索性的项目中，他将为第二人生开发一个原型客户端，提供基本的可访问性，这将使他能够评估盲人玩家完全访问客户端的可行性和技术要求。 原型客户端最初将允许盲人玩家仅使用语音命令在环境中导航;然后将在时间和资源允许的情况下进行增强和扩展，以便使这些玩家能够以有意义的方式与其他玩家进行交互。 实现这些目标并不简单，因为Second Life的客户端和服务器最近才开放源代码，还没有人尝试为环境创建可访问的客户端。 PI确定了一些需要调查和解决的问题，包括如何从环境中提取相关信息，以提供有意义的产出。 这笔资金将使公共信息机构能够探索这方面的替代战略，并与基本客户一起进行无障碍研究，以确定其他问题。 开源社区正在慢慢开始为Second Life添加新功能; PI与基本客户端的经验可能使他能够及时提出建议（例如，对象描述可能需要比现在更丰富，以更好地适应可访问的客户端）。 更广泛的影响：该项目开发的技术可以用于其他大型多人在线游戏（如流行的魔兽世界），更不用说一般的游戏了。 语音导航可以使身体残疾的玩家访问第一人称射击游戏或3D冒险游戏。 PI将利用他在该项目中的经验，为制定游戏的无障碍指南做出贡献，类似于W3C为网站制定的指南，这将使未来的游戏能够以包容的方式开发，以造福社会所有成员。