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Second Life Class Action
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By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Published: 13th November 2006 Copyright Bloor Research © 2006 |
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StumbleUponOne of the beauties of Second Life(SL) is that you hide behind an avatar and, in general, that avatar is different to your real life (RL) persona. Robin Bloor told us that his is taller, younger and more handsome; mine on the other hand wears a pair of psychedelic trousers that I might just have got away with in my hippy university days (oh well, happy days).
This suddenly made me think that SL is a place where everyone is as able as each other. This may well be one of its major shortfalls as it removes some of the diversity of RL that makes it such an interesting place. On the other hand it does give people the opportunity to experience, even somewhat vicariously, being one of a bigger crowd.
However, there are an important group of real lifers who are debarred. Anyone who is blind, has a severe vision impairment, or anyone who cannot use a pointing device easily, will find SL impossible to enter. Even if they get through the first gate, with the help of a friend, they will find it impossible to navigate around or interact with the objects and avatars in SL.
The first, one-time barrier, is that the registration process uses a catpcha that a blind person cannot use; for a solution to this problem see ‘Bloor helps ITA do it better than Google'.
But the real problem comes with the user interface, which gives a visual representation of the SL terrain, any avatars in your vicinity, any object you can interact with, and any instruction displayed on SL notice displays. None of this information is available via a screen reader and none of it can be pointed at without a mouse. Further, the controls such as chat, search, help can only be activated by a mouse click. If any of the above is not correct then I have not been able to find it via the help screens.
My feeling is that as we are still at the relatively earlier stages of SL, so that accessibility issues should be fixed now. It is a new world and it should not debar anyone from it. Given that the interaction between the SL server and the user interface is a set of objects that define scenarios, it should not be that difficult to develop an alternative or extended interface that would provide the information in a format that would make it usable by people with various disabilities.
To make this happen will require some pressure on SL; to this end I am willing to set up the equivalent of a class action inside SL. Before I can start that I need some supporters, please add to this blog if you would like to help, either because you are directly affected or because you understand that it is the right thing to do.
Reader Comments
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14th November 2006: 'Giovanni Liberty' said:
look, instead of helping visually impaired people play a game, why not get a drive together to donate computers to poor people? Only 6 out of 10 households have PC's, and if you don't have a PC you can't play Second Life at all. The way I see it, the visually impaired groups have it better than the 'I'm too poor to get a PC group'. Start with the poor people first if you must take up a cause.
22nd November 2006: 'cowtung' said:
I will be so bold as to say that the accessibility version of SL is IRC. There isn’t much for the visually impaired in SL, unless you really want to hear the crappy music or other useless audio in SL. If you want to make SL accessible, why not make the FPS games accessible too? They could have some auditory way of telling you how close your crosshairs are to the enemy.
24th November 2006: 'BlindChristian' said:
Hi Peter, Thanks for writing to me and pointing out your blog to me. My Blind Confidential blog does indeed have some ideas that are similar to yours. On the specific entry about Second Life Class Action, I agree that they should fix all of their accessibility problems immediately. I would not, however, suggest an alternative interface but, rather, that Second Life simply follow the guidelines set forth by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (http://www.w3c.org/wai). The content guidelines are inexpensive to add to a site as they mostly add text tags to visual elements and any decent screen reader is mostly (if not entirely) compliant with the guidelines. Any screen reader user who claims that their screen reader doesn't work with a WAI compliant site should call their screen reader vendor as, from the assistive technology perspective, we helped write the guidelines and should, therefore, follow our own advice. Alternative interfaces, like the amazon.com text only pages, are never as good as truly accessible, WAI and 508 compliant web sites. In the amazon.com case, the text only pages have numerous bugs and do not provide all of the same features of the main site. As Thurgood Marshall said, "Separate but equal isn't." Enjoy...
3rd January 2007: 'Edo Cleanslate (SL)' said:
SL is a voluntary type of game. It does not owe any duty of responsibility for accessability to anyone.
4th January 2007: 'Peter Abrahams' (Author) said:
I assume that Edo is from Second Life and I would be interested to know if this is an official response from the SL owners.
I should also point out that making any product or service accessible is firstly a social and moral issue not a legal issue. The managers of SL have a moral responsibility to make SL accessible. SL, being a new world, should be better than the real world not worse. There is also a financial reason why SL should be accessible - there is a big community of people with disabilities who might join and be very active in SL if it was accessible.
Lastly I do not think that SL can assume that they do not have a legal responsibility. The case against Target at the moment and the recent UN Convention (see my blog /blogs/Abrahams_Accessibility/2006/12/un_convention_on_disabilities_adop_.html) would suggest that legal action may well be taken in the future and SL should avoid these problems by becoming accessible.
8th January 2007: 'Ordinal Malaprop' said:
There are keyboard shortcuts for almost all basic functions in Second Life - I rarely use the menus, personally speaking. Quite a lot of the functions are mouse-based, though.
It would be useful to know exactly which aspects you would appreciate greater access to. Given that the world is scriptable, and that the client has recently been open-sourced, I'm sure that it would be possible for residents to help in various ways. I would imagine that a client giving, say, audible feedback would be quite possible to create (though that is beyond me personally).
8th January 2007: 'Jolan' said:
So how exactly is a blind user supposed to navigate a 3D world, where unlike the real world, they cannot physically feel or smell anything? How is a blind user supposed to know the difference between an object that can be moved or used and a tree? Oh I get it, Microsoft Sam will describe, in detail, every object, script, conversation and avatar within distance. So rather than some random naked guy flying past with a big squiggly penis attached (because he's using a free account or trying to get banned, OR the user is standing just outside the boundries of an adult location), good ol faithful MS Sam will yell out the speakers so everyone in the house can hear..."A naked guy with a big floppy penis just whizzed by your face!"
- Jolan
9th January 2007: 'Eelke Folmer' said:
If you would like to know how a blind user can navigate a 3d world check the 3d first person shooter Terraformers http://www.terraformers.nu
11th January 2007: 'AudioGames.net' said:
Or check out http://audiogames.net/db.php?action=view&id=theblindeye for another 3D game that is accessible for the blind using a simple auditory interface. And while you're at it, why not check out http://www.game-accessibility.com and http://www.igda.org/accessibility to read up on accessibility in games and see what's already possible - accessibility-wise.
8th January 2007: 'Caliandris Pendragon' said:
I'm caught between two different responses to your posting. I am a passionately enthusiastic member of Second Life, a mentor, builder, and creator there for almost three years. I want the world to be as accessible as possible to anyone and I do think that's the right thing to do.
But I don't agree with your idea of a class action. Maybe it is partly an English antipathy to taking recourse to the law unless all other avenues have been exhausted, but as I have written about this a couple of times already this evening, on the SL forums and the VTOR blog, I have realised that it is the disempowerment that it indicates which I dislike the most.
SL is a world in which anything is possible, and with the launch of the open source client today, that includes making your own client, which can do any or all of the things that you want. If you want them, is there any reason that you and your group of supporters may not do that yourself?
Now THERE's a cause I would be able to support ... rather than demanding that Linden Labs should supply it, make it your world and your imagination, and bring to it the things you think it should have.
11th January 2007: 'Peter Abrahams' (Author) said:
Caliandris
I am sure we are both on the same side of this argument.
My idea was to have 'the equivalent of a class action inside SL'. In general, class actions related to disabilities are not designed to sue for damages but to raise awareness of the issue and get it fixed.
SL, being a new world, I had to hope that it would not have some of the bad features of RL. Its lack of accessibility is an issue and I felt that it was important to try and fix it early.
To a limited extent I feel my blog has succeeded. It has helped to increase awareness and the open source client announcement although not specifically aimed at accessibility provides a way of getting it fixed.
8th January 2007: 'Devian' said:
Why not just Sue First life for you being blind, if you see poorly in the first world, you're going to see Poorly in SL. Sorry, but thats the way it works.
Get this. By the sound of it, this guy is trying to organize a bunch of blind people to sue Linden Lab because SL is a visual environment. Wow. Talk about lack of a first life. Come on.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for supporting the rights of the disabled, but this is beyond insane. What's next? Should they sue the Anderson Window Company for not making windows that verbally describe what's going on outside. I mean, really, those windows only work for people who can see, right? That's discrimination, right?
Or how about suing the automobile industry for not making sonar driven cars? Blind people can't drive regular cars. That's discrimination, right?
I know some of you are probably thinking, "Whoa, Chosen, you're being so insensitive to the disabled." Well, I'll tell you what then. I happen to have a disability myself, ADD, which among other things makes it difficult for me to read as quickly as most other people. Would anyone else similarly afflicted care to join me in a class action suit against the Association of American Publishers for their failure to print books that jump up and slap us across the face when our minds start to wander from our reading?
When we're done, let's get all the deaf people together, and sue the music industry for making stuff that only people who can hear can hear. After that, let's find all the people whose noses don't work, and sue all the florists we can find for growing flowers that only people who can smell can smell.
Or, we can maybe just accept the fact that not every person in this world is meant to do every little thing. That might be a little easier.
Thoughts? Or better yet, Why don't I sue the image system if I can';t see the letters for the CAPTCHA system?
11th January 2007: 'Peter Abrahams' (Author) said:
Devian
Where to start!?
Maybe with your ADD disability. You are right you cannot sue the book publishers. You are able to read the book even if you find it more difficult than some people; compare this to a blind person who cannot access SL at all.
You may also be able to find some technology that will help, an eye-ball tracker could see if you wander from the page for too long and give you a stimulus to get you back on track, or maybe a talking book would hold your concentration better. What a blind person needs is not to be able to see (however much they might wish for that) but a way of accessing the book or the web or SL.
Further I disagree with you that SL is basically visual. SL is a world where people (avatars) can interact, chat, play, do business and socialise. The visualisation of SL is just a convenient way for sighted people to interact with SL there is no reason why it should be the only way. You could say that the Internet is a visual experience but that does not stop people with visual impairments making very active and productive use of it.
8th January 2007: 'RadAlien' said:
Secondlife is now open source. Oh snap! Looks like instead of whining you'll just have to write your own damn viewer.
Also, your webpage here uses CAPTCHA that requires you to see or hear. I had to open a graphic web browser instead of using lynx. Looks like you're discriminating against Hellen Keller. Better sue yourself.
11th January 2007: 'Peter Abrahams' (Author) said:
With open source there is now the possibility to make SL accessible. That was not possible before and hence my reason for whining.
If anyone has a CATCHPA solution that provides the necessary security but is also accessible by the deaf-blind community then please tell me.
11th January 2007: 'LL' said:
Lets have a class action against IT-Analysis.com and IT-Director.com for their CAPTCHA system (I am writing this on behalf of a deaf-blind person who cannot post a comment on your site - this is discrimination). We want to see these websites withdrawl this unnecessary form protection.
11th January 2007: 'XXX' said:
LL, Damn good idea.
We'll show these muppets how to design an accessible web site.
Listen up all you PHP developers - who's interested in making this a much better site?
11th January 2007: 'Laurence S' said:
Fantastic idea. I know a bunch of guys over at SourceForge who would love to take these websites on. All we ask is for our names to be displayed somewhere on the site - a credits page.
Peter your comments please?
11th January 2007: 'Sanjay' said:
I represent a team of offshore developers (India and China) and would love to take this website on in the name of open source. Please can someone make an official post about this possibility? Peter?
11th January 2007: 'Peter Abrahams' (Author) said:
Registered users who have logged-on are not asked to fill in a CATCHPA.
The registration process is a one off exercise that does include a CATCHPA. If you can help your friend that one time then after that they can add comments to any of our articles or blogs.
I would really appreciate input from them as a severe disabilities such as deaf-blind throw up new insights into accessibility and usability in general. I look forward to hearing more.
What about developing a SL client for this community?
8th January 2007: 'Joshua Linden' said:
Hey there – I’m Joshua Linden from Linden Lab, one of the folks who help create the Second Life platform. (The world, of course, is created by the residents.) We are deeply committed to making Second Life usable by everyone. A large number of Second Life residents have “First Life” disabilities and enjoy the freedoms that a virtual world offers – from communication to movement. However, we’re still a very small company and have limited development resources, so we have not been able to do everything we want to – yet! That includes standard interfaces for accessibility tools.
We have recently done a substantial rework of our keyboard focus code to make things more predictable. As a benefit that was clearly in mind at the time, this will make it easier to eventually hook up focus-based screen readers (which typically work by interrogating the active application for changes in the displayed text) and support alternative input technologies. This is a much longer term project than simply saying “we support the W3C WAI” since accessibility hooks are built into many Web browsers already, whereas the Second Life viewer is a stand-alone application. (Long term, one could hope that content-creators in-world can tag their creations in such a way as to be more accessible once the viewer is fully accessible!)
Speaking of opening up, today (8 Jan 2007) we announced that the Second Life viewer source code is available under an open source license. See http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/01/08/embracing-the-inevitable/ for the announcement and links. We strongly encourage other developers to take on projects such as interfacing the Second Life viewer to work with alternative input and output mechanisms such as screen readers. Don’t just wait for us to do it!
11th January 2007: 'Peter Abrahams' (Author) said:
Joshua
This is great news. I am sure that we will soon see some extensions to the client to improve its accessibility.
I am writing a blog on the announcement which should be published soon and I hope will encourage discussion on the requirements.
9th January 2007: 'Sana Barbara' said:
This can be a tad misleading, perhaps it may be inaccessible to some but not all visually impaired. I am legally blind with retinitis pigmentosa and run a successful business on SL. I do have problems with areas that are very dark, or when there are alot of people talking but find turning chat history on helps there. Perhaps you should change your statement as to not reflect on the entire visually impaired community at large. thanks.
11th January 2007: 'Peter Abrahams' (Author) said:
Sana
Apologises you are quite right. My defence is that in writing short blogs it is difficult to discuss all the nuances of accessibility and my main thrust was that the SL client has a number of limitations that impact a variety of disability communities.
Hopefully if the client is improved to support people with a variety of vision impairments it may actually make the experience better for you too.
9th January 2007: 'SLUSER' said:
let me see if i understand this: You wish for second life to be more acesseble(sp) to blind people? and because its visual, its SL fault that vision impaired people cannot play it?
that Sir, for a journalist, is an all time low. and i really hope anyone with common sense, disregards your attempt at garnering media attention for your crap writing skills.
11th January 2007: 'Peter Abrahams' (Author) said:
I am sorry you do not like my writing skills.
I think if you read the other entries in this blog that people do believe the client can be improved.
And as I say above I do not think that SL is a visual game it is a society that should be open to as many as possible.
9th January 2007: 'Jeremy' said:
Peter, in total agreement. All these social websites should be made to adhere to the same rules and legislation as commercial sites.
10th January 2007: 'Eelke Folmer' said:
I think games in general should be made more accessible. E.g. if you buy a DVD in most cases it has subtitles or closed captioning but the majority of the games lacks these features.
Making games accessible for the auditory impaired is relatively easy and the payoff is big (there are an estimated 10 million people in the US with hearing impairments, with game designers making huge losses on the majority of the games it is market you cannot ignore). Making games accessible for physically disabled can already start by allowing them to reconfigure buttons on their controller (So they can use a one handed controller for example) or allowing for alternative input devices such as a headtracker. I guess making games accessible for the blind is the biggest challenge but not impossible. As a game designer you will get the biggest payoff in moral terms ;-)
10th January 2007: 'Devian' said:
9.5 million of those people are over the age of 70. LL isn't loosing anything.
As someone once said before, Second Life is not manditory, they Owe nobody anything. And I LOVE how a site like this is complaining yet willing to use CAPTCHA
11th January 2007: 'Rob H' said:
As another reader posted elsewhere on this site - why not make IT-Analysis.com an open source project?
*It will cut all those business and technical development costs
* evolve much faster and meet demands from people from all walks of life (i.e. disabled)
* be truly independent
* reflect what the reader wants to see and not to make money from invasive, intrusive and non-contextual advertising!
You would be the first analyst organisation to do this. Think about it...
11th January 2007: 'Ponla' said:
Phenomenal idea - imagine what open sourcing a website like this would do to the competition :-)
11th January 2007: 'MartinB' said:
Why not integrate a CVS server into the site and make a web front end available at cvs.it-analysis.com; anyone could contribute materials and a governing board could direct. You could even ask for donations from contributing analysts (if not already) and remove those tiresome adverts.
11th January 2007: 'sackrace' said:
There wouldn't be ANY development or business costs if you surrender to the open source model. Imagine it - free and rapid PHP development! Yes you would have still have to pay hosting fees, but then I am sure there are hosting companies out there who would offer a server in exchange for some publicity...
11th January 2007: 'Dustin' said:
Inspired. An open source news portal - this could be a BIG success.
11th January 2007: 'Bryan' said:
Dumb idea. IT-Analysis.com is obviously a business that makes profit by publishing the materials of independent analyst companies. Moving to an open source model would destroy this business!
11th January 2007: 'A Happy Contributor' said:
I personally think that the current development team, Miles and Brian (see /blogs/Freeform_Comment/2006/12/thanks_to_miles_and_brian.html), are doing a great job with this website. When ever there is a problem raised it is fixed within hours, not days or months like other websites.
Open Sourcing would be a bad decision.
11th January 2007: 'Peter Abrahams' (Author) said:
Following the announcement of the open source client for SL and the opportunity that brings to improving the accessibility of SL I have written a new blog so the discussion can move on from 'why SL is not accessible' on to the more productive discussion of 'what should be in the client to make it more accessible' . I believe that not only will that discussion allow participation by a wider population (including the over 70s) but will also provide enhanced experience for all users.
Thanks to all the contributors on this blog, I look forward to more entries on the new blog.
11th January 2007: 'Sunny' said:
wtf, why would a blind person even want to play SL,
SL is Visual and that is its beauty, if u want text, go to some IRC channel. Linden Labs doesnt owe any particular group of people special software that costs millions to develop, heck they are having a hard eneogh time keeping their SINGLE viewer up and running.
NOW Second life has released the source code for this so if someone wants a viewer that the blind can use, Invest their money hire a programmer and get on with it.
Its a pretty sad world when people think others OWE them something. Litigation is the tool of fools and parasites.
14th January 2007: 'Winter Ventura' said:
What you're proposing.. is suing Netscape, because Amazon's page isn't accessable.
Secondlife is a medium.. in which, 95% of all content is user created. Much like the World Wide Web. While there are some adjustments that could be made to the user interface to make it more compliant to low vision users (adjustable font sizes for example).. you're never going to be able to get past the simple fact that the "house" you're trying to interact with, may have been created by a guy in South Vietnam, who doesn't speak english, and doesn't care about "standards".
But in this case, there is no scrutiny on the development of the game elements, environments, and soforth. Everything is made out of "Prims"... which all start their life out as "a small rectilinear box, or cube, that is solid, and appears to be made of wood. it's dimensions are one-half meter along each side."
An object in game can be made of up to 255 of these items. No builder is going to sit down and label each element of a creation. In fact, larger builds cannot be linked in any manner. So a building in front of you may be "300 prims" rather than "a building". While Objects DO have a description field.. most often, if this is used at all, it is used to store dynamic variables for a script inside the object.
With other video games, all content can be carefully and thoughtfully tagged with low vision descriptions. (though how a first person shooter can work for the blind.. I have no idea.. nor really any idea WHY one would bother.
Frankly... I don't think this is one you're going to win. Like suing the Mexican government for not making the Aztec pyramids wheelchair accessable. I would say that there is an ethical imperative to provide as much assistance as is reasonable.. but there is not a "right" being violated in this case.
I think that Linden Labs is willing to meet you part way, making sam compliant tooltips for example... and developing keyboard equivalents to most actions.
But at the end of the day.. if you can't see, and you can't use a mouse.. maybe you should get someone to help you interact with SL... or perhaps do something a bit more.. accessable. Like read a book or watch TV.
It's been said before, and I'll say it again. The client is now open source. Hire some programmers and develop your own low vision version of the client. And if you can find a way to allow blind people to drive cars in this world.. I'll get the hell off the sidewalks.
11th February 2007: 'Carol Perryman' said:
I was most interested to see this commentary, because it's a concern of mine, as well. I am a medical librarian in rl, and in SL, as Carolina Keats, I am working on a grant-funded project to support the information needs of SL residents (HealthInfo Island). Recently I have begun to reach out to those residents (because there are a fair number with scripting and programming skills) and to organizations which have a presence at SL. Things ARE beginning to happen. SL - and its residents - do indeed recognize participation by all as a most desirable goal. but we have to start somewhere, right? In an environment built by the people, we can build accessibility. Already, I am aware that Dragon Naturally Speaking, a program that enables speech-to-text transfer, is compatible with SL software. I hope to identify more technology that can 'play nice' with SL, and to boost awareness and support in world and beyond.
17th July 2007: 'Sue C' said:
Hi Carol I hope you check back on this even though your last post was some time ago. I have just tried using certain life with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and find that although I can 'speak' to other users using dictated text, I am unable to move my avatar using voice commands. If you have found a way to make this work, please let me know.
Sue
25th January 2008: 'Myron Curtis' said:
The truth is that there are a lot of people, including myself, trying to find ways of fixing the accessibility problem for the sight deprived. I can get chat and IMs read by Microsoft speech tools, using EVA, and I can get primitives to send proximity reports on the chat channel so they can be read as well, but I can't get the menus or other interfaces to be readable. All of the structures and animations are defined by programs, so it is possible to have their critical attributes translated to the user, and that could help with being able to build or manipulate objects. There was also an experiment done by one school that used an echo location system to allow navigation without visual clues. So, this can be solved, and it will be. Why try? Well, I'm a teacher, and in America if you want to teach anywhere, that place needs to be accessible. That is also true for RL businesses that want to operate legally here. Besides it makes sense to offer your products and services to all potential consumers.
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