The metaverse is a powerful tool to enable collaboration for people, no matter where they are in the physical world. At Virbela, we have prioritized making access to the metaverse as easy as possible. We want users of all skills and abilities to feel included in the Virbela experience.

Accessibility for persons with disabilities is vital as Virbela develops its future roadmap. As we design new features, we will incorporate best practices around focus (i.e., visually highlighting the current element that a user is interacting with, making it easy for them to understand where their actions will take effect) and keyboard navigation. We are also working to determine where to improve existing functionality, especially around our presenter tool.

We have made some progress towards our goals for accessibility. We have always supported the ability to make fonts larger. In January 2023, we improved the focus and contrast of the login and registration screens for better visibility.

We are also introducing Speech-to-Text in our 2.10 version, which we will roll out in September 2023. This means Virbela can begin transcribing voice and displaying it on screen. Users can also translate speech and display captions in other languages.

Once we release Speech-to-Text, Virbela will focus on improving accessibility in other areas, using the WCAG standards as guideposts. However, WCAG deals with websites, whereas Virbela is a 3D virtual space. This means there are more complexities to our system than what the standards cover.

As a result, we need to focus on solving critical problems. We are prioritizing the following user journeys:

• Ensure people who are blind can navigate to meetings and use base features like the mute button.
• Ensure people with motor function disabilities can navigate to meetings.
• Ensure people with motor function disabilities can interact with web boards.

We believe these are the primary use cases we must resolve, but we are happy to discuss other use cases with our customers. We understand that we want to allow users to do everything, but we cannot update everything simultaneously. Instead, we need to focus on what is essential. We would prioritize these areas over others (e.g., driving speedboats).

One final note: we intend to respond to all WCAG 2 guidelines. That said, we may not approach these standards literally. For example, we will ensure people who are blind can use their native screen readers to get into a meeting. This may mean we build Virbela's desktop application to work with native screen readers, or it may mean we create a deep linking system to work with a user's calendar, thus avoiding the need for Virbela to interact with a screen reader.

Please let us know what is essential to your organization so we can improve our accessibility roadmap.