{"id":19091,"date":"2021-05-30T11:59:26","date_gmt":"2021-05-30T18:59:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=19091"},"modified":"2021-05-30T12:34:07","modified_gmt":"2021-05-30T19:34:07","slug":"accessibility-in-online-gathering-spaces-like-gather-and-kumospace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2021\/05\/30\/accessibility-in-online-gathering-spaces-like-gather-and-kumospace\/","title":{"rendered":"Accessibility in online gathering spaces like Gather and Kumospace"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I\u2019m seeing reactions that I think are worth signal-boosting regarding conventions held in virtual spaces like Gather (aka GatherTown) and Kumospace.<\/p>\r\n

The core of the issue is that although those kinds of spaces may be really useful and accessible for some people, they\u2019re really inaccessible and hard to use for a lot of other people.<\/p>\r\n

(In this post, I\u2019m going to talk about some of the good things about those systems as well as some of the bad things.)<\/p>\r\n

For anyone who doesn\u2019t know about these kinds of spaces (I hadn\u2019t heard of them \u2019til a couple months ago), here\u2019s a simplified description: attendees visit a website and see an overhead view of a 2D room. Within that room, each attendee has an avatar of some sort, which they can move around in the room. It looks a lot like playing a certain kind of video game. When your avatar is near other avatars, you and the owners of the other avatars can hear live audio of each other and see live video of each other. (For anyone who doesn\u2019t have their mic or camera turned off, of course.)<\/p>\r\n

The idea is to simulate a physical space. People can gather in small groups in the same larger room, and their conversations don\u2019t interfere with each other. You can \u201csit\u201d at a \u201ctable\u201d (by moving your avatar next to the image of the table) and other people who are wandering through can \u201csit\u201d there too and chat with you. You can fairly easily drift in and out of group conversations. It lets you have the freeform and serendipitous social interactions of a physical space.<\/p>\r\n

For me, this is much<\/em> more psychologically comfortable than something like a Zoom breakout room, which I still haven\u2019t used in this kind of context. I feel like it\u2019s analogous to the difference between a big open physical space and a physical space that\u2019s separated into small rooms, each with a closed opaque door. For me, having to open a door to peek into a conversation on the other side of it, without knowing who\u2019s there or what they\u2019re talking about, is anxiety-provoking. Whereas being able to linger unobtrusively at the edge of a conversation, and then join in gradually if I want to and if there\u2019s conversational space for me to do so, is a lot more comfortable for me.<\/p>\r\n

However, the Gather\/Kumospace paradigm is really inaccessible for a lot of people.<\/p>\r\n

For one thing, the whole metaphor is designed around looking at a space and using relatively fine motor control to navigate through it. The spaces are filled with images of physical stuff\u2014walls, tables, chairs, plants, etc. (Those items are mostly just decoration rather than functional things or obstacles, but they\u2019re a very prominent aspect of the virtual space.) Navigation generally involves looking at the image of the space and moving your avatar around in that space, using keyboard keys or a mouse pointer. There are some kinds of workarounds\u2014Gather, for example, suggests using their Follow feature to have someone else guide you around the space\u2014but the paradigm of the system is not friendly to people who have visual or fine-motor-control disabilities.<\/p>\r\n

Those problems are exacerbated when a convention tries to make the virtual space even more like a physical space. For example, this year\u2019s Eastercon used Gather, and if I understand right, they laid things out in the virtual space in such a way that you had to move your avatar a very long way down a virtual hallway to get from one room to another. I imagine that facilitated serendipitous hallway meetings, but it also made the space a lot harder (and more time-consuming) for a lot of people to navigate.<\/p>\r\n

And the issues with these kinds of spaces go beyond the visual and movement issues. For example:<\/p>\r\n