[Air-L] Second Life and Accessibility

Kimberly De Vries cuuixsilver at gmail.com
Thu Apr 3 13:59:44 PDT 2008


Hi again Sue,

I think for us it's a matter of resources; assistants are provided to
students with all kinds of disabilities and I think the university has
decided that they will focus on the "live" classes with that.  And there are
other obstacles to our doing much with SL in general that I think coupled
with the accessibility issue, make it a low priority.

Best,

Kim

On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 1:34 PM, Sue Cranmer <sue at jcranmer.freeserve.co.uk>
wrote:

> Hi Kimberley
>
> Thanks for responding. I have heard that some universities in the US are
> using SL by providing students with visual disabilities with assistants to
> support them (though of course there are issues with this in terms of
> autonomy, empowerment etc) and so it's interesting to hear your University
> have ruled it out this far. Thanks again for replying.
>
> Regards,
> Sue
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org
> [mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Kimberly De Vries
> Sent: Thursday, 03 April 2008 20:35
> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Second Life and Accessibility
>
>
> Sue,
>
> My school (CSU Stanislaus) has been experimenting with Second Life, but I
> recently learned that it's not going to pursue developing anything
> substantial much right now precisely because there is no good way to
> support
> visually disabled users and so we could never require students to use it;
> it
> would always have to be an optional add-on.  --Requiring something that is
> inaccessible to any group of students is of course right out.
>
> Best,
>
> Kim
> English Dept.
> CSU Stanislaus
>
> On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 12:19 PM, Sue Cranmer <sue at jcranmer.freeserve.co.uk
> >
> wrote:
>
> > Hello
> >
> > I'm writing to ask how members of the list are supporting students
> > with disabilities when using online social worlds such as second life.
> > Whilst there is a growing awareness that certain groups of disabled
> > users enjoy aspects of participating in online worlds which they are
> > unable to carry out in the so-called real world, such as wheelchair
> > users being able to walk etc, others are unable to participate at all.
> > For instance, screen readers
> > for blind and partially sighted users do not work within second life;
> nor
> > do
> > speech input systems such as Dragon naturally speaking (which I use).  I
> > would be really interested to hear of list members experiences.
> >
> > Best Wishes
> >
> > Sue
> >
> >
> > This text was dictated using Speech Recognition software. Apologies
> > for any mistakes left uncorrected.
> >
> > No virus found in this outgoing message.
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> >
> >
> >
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>
>
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