Yvonne Felix has been using augmented reality as an assistive technology since 2012. She tells me, "I actually wear an augmented reality device that allows me to see. I'm legally blind, so that means that I have about 2% of my vision left. And I use something called eSight Eyewear that actually gives me access to 100% of my vision, depending on the situation."



I recorded this interview with Felix the VRTO conference back in 2018, and I wanted to include it in this series because I heard a lot of excitement from attendees at the XR Access Symposium 2023 on the assistive technology potential of XR. Felix told me, "Because we are actually the first people who are mobile with an AR device, using it for a specific application, I think we're actually going to start the trend that it's okay to wear AR in society and that it's accepted because look at the impact it's making."



XR Access co-founder Shiri Azenkot told me, "There's a very exciting opportunity to take these technologies, especially augmented reality, and to use them as accessibility tools. So to look at how we can use these new platforms to solve current unsolved problems that specifically people with disabilities experience... There's so many other potential applications out there. It's a very exciting opportunity."



Some of the most compelling applications of Augmented Reality are likely to going to be in the realm of assistive technologies like Felix explores in this interview. The endgame of XR Accessibility is not just to make VR and AR technologies more accessible, but to make physical reality itself more accessible. Again, Azenkot told me, "You need to think more about how we make the physical world accessible and think about how that can be incorporated into these experiences rather than trying to take a two-dimensional accessibility framework and trying to kind of fit it, squash it into this new paradigm."



Making the physical world more accessible is going to be a long journey as there are a lot of problems yet to be solved. But the consensus from the XR Access Symposium 2023 gathering seemed to be that solving accessibility problems for low-vision users within virtual reality like Owlchemy Labs has done with Cosmonious High, is likely going to provide design inspiration for helping to solve some of the more intractable problems in helping make the physical world more accessible through AR technologies. As the pioneering work of Felix shows, then there is certainly a huge amount of potential for XR to be used as an assistive technology.











This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.



Music: Fatality