XAUR and MAUR: articulation of requirements

I have reviewed the Media Accessibility User Requirements (MAUR) for the purpose of deriving ideas that may facilitate development of the XR Accessibility User Requirements (XAUR).

I am aware that Josh (and possibly others) have undertaken similar reviews.

Many of the requirements in the MAUR relate directly to user-agent functionality, and, through this, to capabilities of the underlying Web technologies. This focus may be explained by motivating interest (described by Janina at an RQTF meeting) in the media capabilities of HTML 5. The underlying approach seems to be to describe the functionality that ought to be provided to satisfy the needs of users as described in the document.

One of the challenges we encounter in developing the XR Accessibility User Requirements is that it isn’t clear where many of the user needs are best satisfy – how they fit into the design of the Web technologies, the user agent, the components for building applications, and the applications themselves. Thus, it seems to me that we are at this stage articulating user needs, and trying to determine where they fit in an evolving combination of Web standards and implementation technologies without a clear view of how the over-all architecture is likely to work – or, at least, what the good architectural options are.

Obviously, the MAUR benefited from the entire history of captions, sign language video and descriptions, including the Web technologies (such as timed text) developed to support these tools. By contrast, if I recall the survey of relevant literature, there is some implementation experience of meeting important access needs with XR in a research setting, but relatively little experience of meeting a broad range of needs in XR applications that are designed to be generally accessible. If I’m wrong in this assessment, I would welcome examples to the contrary that can inform this work further. The overlap with game accessibility obviously lends some implementation experience that is relevant as well.

Perhaps a useful line of inquiry would be to clarify how different Web technologies (including Web standards that are under development) would interact in a typical XR application, and what capabilities (e.g., libraries, authoring environment) can be expected to be available to support the development process. Then, we can consider different ways in which the user’s needs could be met, and what the trade-offs are as between application authors, authoring environment, library/component creators, assistive technology developers, and user agent developers of different architectural approaches. If we could perform the analysis with several typical examples of XR applications, I think this would help us (or, at least, me) to understand what the options are and how they affect different parts of the infrastructure for XR on the Web.

It seems to me that we may need some hypothetical “system and application architecture” examples alongside the examples of what would be experienced by the end user. What are useful and valid ways of designing it if we could manipulate the Web technologies, the authoring environment, the user-agent, the assistive technologies, application components, and the XR applications to support the user needs that we have identified?

Would it be useful to write descriptions of several well chosen, hypothetical application examples, working with those most familiar with the emerging standards and prior implementation experience to elucidate the architectural options?


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