Developing an Accessible Client for Second life

第二人生是一个大型的多人在线游戏（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能使用鼠标的人错过了这种独特的体验，尽管它可能对他们最有好处。“第二人生”目前拥有600多万“居民”，而且还在快速增长。虽然在道德上、法律上和经济上都有理由为这种环境开发一个可访问的客户端，但PI的目标是改善美国数百万上述类型的残疾人的生活质量。在这个探索性项目中，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，这将使他能够评估客户端的可行性和技术要求，使盲人玩家完全可以访问。原型客户端最初将允许盲人玩家仅使用语音命令来导航环境；然后，在时间和资源允许的情况下，它将得到加强和扩展，从而使这些玩家能够以有意义的方式与其他玩家进行互动。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源，还没有人尝试为该环境创建可访问的客户端。PI已经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输出。这笔资金将使PI能够探索这方面的备选战略，并与基本客户进行无障碍研究，以确定其他问题。开源社区正慢慢开始为第二人生添加新功能；PI与基本客户端的经验可能允许他及时提出建议（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：本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。语音导航可以让身体残疾的玩家体验第一人称射击游戏或3D冒险游戏。PI将利用他在这个项目中的经验，为游戏制定可访问性准则，这与W3C为网站制定的准则在精神上类似，这将使未来的游戏以一种包容的方式开发，造福于所有社会成员。

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.