Prior research has highlighted numerous accessibility barriers within virtual reality software, with guidelines emerging to address the requirements of diverse audiences. However, an empirical understanding of industry practitioner implementation of accessible guidelines within mainstream commercial applications is currently lacking. This review addresses this gap by categorising all accessibility features presented at a software-level in 330 of the most used virtual reality applications released between 2016 to 2023 on the Steam, Meta, Oculus, Viveport, and SideQuest platforms. Results suggest a growing lack of interaction customisation, with the number of applications allowing for alternative inputs and physical posture flexibility decreasing. Meanwhile, display output settings, such as text font resizing and colourblind alterations, are almost completely absent. Our findings highlight the evolution in the implementation of accessible features in virtual reality software, contributing to a representative overview of practitioner decisions, and acting as a catalyst towards the establishment of industry-wide guidelines.

Exploration of virtual reality locomotion has a rich history, including in the creation of taxonomies categorising individual techniques. However, most existing research collects data from academic sources only, with both historic industry practitioner exploration and a state-of-the-art understanding of locomotion in commercial applications comparatively underexplored. This systematic software-level review of the complete locomotion options in 330 of the most used virtual reality applications released between 2016 and 2023 on the Steam, Meta, Oculus, Viveport, and SideQuest platforms highlights the trends and gaps that exist between industry and academic exploration. Results suggest a decline in the usage of teleportation, with the prevalence of titles containing at least one teleportation technique decreasing from 48% of those released in 2016 to 18% in 2023. Arm-tracked grabbing locomotion techniques such as climbing meanwhile are being increasingly adopted by practitioners, from almost unused in 3% of applications released in 2016 to over 30% in each year between 2020 and 2023. Additionally, although the tracking capabilities afforded by consumer-level head-mounted display hardware has resulted in a high exploration of room-scale tracking, the large academic focus on walking-based locomotion appears to not be shared by practitioners, where room-scale tracking instead is most often paired with conventional controller joystick sliding locomotion. Finally, temporal analysis results showing the growing number of locomotion techniques offered in an average application signifies the need for further accessibility-related locomotion research, particularly in areas beyond visual sickness mitigation. Our findings highlight the continuing evolution of locomotion in commercial virtual reality applications, with industry practitioner locomotion technique adoption rates displaying the divergent interests between industry and academia, in turn adding rigour to future locomotion selections across both domains.

Conventionally, the accessibility research community centers most of its efforts on designing assistive technologies and systems related to single categories of impairments. Although this approach has contributed to valuable progress and advancements in the field, there is a growing consensus among accessibility researchers that focusing on designing technologies for single impairments oversimplifies disability since this approach may fail to adequately address the real-world experiences of a significant population of users with complex needs. Despite challenges related to conducting research with users living with multiple, profound, or complex disabilities, it is essential in terms of future work that the accessibility research community adopts a more inclusive approach where users with lived experience of multiple disabilities are directly informing and shaping the design of assistive systems and accessible technologies. Therefore, we propose the 2nd International Workshop on Accessibility Research and Users with Multiple Disabilities or Complex Needs. The workshop will act as a forum for participants to share their perspectives related to challenges and opportunities in designing accessible systems that consider the multidimensional needs of users living with multiple disabilities. This workshop intends to challenge current paradigms in the accessibility field, share latest work and foster future collaborations.

As sign languages are often the native languages for members of the Deaf community, text captioning can be inaccessible, highlighting the importance of sign language interpretation. This research explores sign language in virtual reality 360-degree three degrees of freedom videos, exploring two rendering modes, fixed-position and always-visible, and two visual guiding methods, arrows and radar. Findings from testing with eight participants indicates that fixed-position rendering provides participants with a greater sense of presence than always-visible rendering, whilst always-visible rendering produces less of a blocking effect. Arrows appear more usable than radar for visually guiding participants to active speakers, including providing a higher level of sign language understanding. Future research is needed to validate these findings with six degrees of freedom content.