SUMMARY: Identification of balances of bacterial taxa in relation to continuous and dichotomous outcomes is an increasingly frequent analytic objective in microbiome profiling experiments. SurvBal enables the selection of balances in relation to censored survival or time-to-event outcomes which are of considerable interest in many biomedical studies. The most commonly used survival models-the Cox proportional hazards and parametric survival models are included in the package, which are used in combination with step-wise selection procedures to identify the optimal associated balance of microbiome, i.e. the ratio of the geometric means of two groups of taxa's relative abundances. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The SurvBal R package and Shiny app can be accessed at https://github.com/yinglia/SurvBal and https://yinglistats.shinyapps.io/shinyapp-survbal/.

According to the World Health Organization, there are more than one billion people with moderate or severe distance vision impairment or blindness worldwide in 2020. Due to recent COVID-19 safety measures, online events have moved to online platforms in order to maintain physical distancing. The transition towards online gatherings have shown gaps associated with technology and internet access, along with lacking accessibility, which has resulted in reactive responses to improve usability by adding captioning, compatibility with screen readers, and image captioning to cite some examples. However, traditional video conference lacks immersion and presence otherwise found in virtual reality (VR), for example Mozilla Hubs, Engage VR, AltspaceVR, and Virbela amongst others. Although these services and consumer-level hardware are becoming ubiquitous, there are still accessibility challenges to be met when designing VR experiences. In this work-in-progress paper we explore the design of an inclusive web-based VR application that simulates registering at a virtual conference and navigating to a presentation room. Our preliminary study focused on usability and engagement by inviting participants to experience the demo eyes closed. Our preliminary results show the audio cues were helpful to navigate the environment without visual feedback.