So, it's important that your immersive experience is inclusive and that you don't just build it for yourself or for a type of user that you might have in your head. What is inclusive design? Well, a great quote from Annie Jean-Baptiste, Head of Inclusive Design for Google – she said that product inclusion is the practice of applying an inclusive lens throughout
the entire product design and development process to create better products and thus accelerate business growth. So, inclusive design is something you start from the very beginning when you're thinking about your VR creation. Who have you left out? Who else do you need to think about? And include and go talk to and understand and bring that experience to your creation.
It's not enough to just create a product that is just for, for example, people with legs. So, that's always a reminder for me, to remember that experience of the bias that you can bring, even just from standing or sitting and crawling. And that's why you need to move around when you're designing or coming up with designs for virtual reality. The question with inclusive design is, *Who are we impacting?* Which user? Which community? Which historical, cultural
or political context have we learned about, have we thought about, have we included? And even the environmental picture. And just bringing that *cross-cultural experience* is going to make your content more inclusive and more diverse, so even environmental can be a point of exclusion. Like in this piece that was done: 'Traveling While Black'. So, 'Traveling While Black' is a story of this guy, when he was young, he used to travel across the South.
And every summer, his family, they would drive on vacation; they had to stay in Black-only hotels. They kept getting pulled over by the police. And so, it's a VR story about this experience to kind of help you empathize and understand this reality of being harassed while you're Black in the United States. And as Baptiste said, it starts at the very beginning, goes throughout your entire product life-cycle, checking in with users, checking in with subject matter experts,
and then all the way to how you market it, so that you're marketing it with diversity and a message of equity, which is bringing everyone in and giving those who are often left out representation. And when we say 'representation', we're talking gender, we're talking age, we're talking disability, of course, with inclusion, we're talking about body size. Maybe country-versus-city type of bias or reality.
We're talking about *invisible disabilities*, such as neurodiversity, such as autism spectrum or dyslexia. These kind of disabilities – I mean, think about it; if you have a lot of reading in your experience or in your onboarding and it's all text, someone that dyslexia is going to struggle with that. If you have an avatar and all your avatars are skinny and not representing different body sizes, that may send a message that this is just for this certain type of person.
Think about ethnic group, and of course race, and more, so that person's experiences and what they might bring to the content that you create, the narrative, the way that you unfold your particular experience. So, the question we ask in inclusive design is 'at what cost?' so the individual or community rights. You know – are we going to harm that person or their identity, their well-being? The Xbox launched in 2022 an inclusive avatar editor.
And this allows users to customize an avatar to the way that they might best represent themselves or their identity. Let's talk about *disability* in particular. Disability has blindness, low vision, mobility disabilities, deaf and hard of hearing, and cognitive. And cognitive is what we now call 'neurodiversity'. That includes ADD, autism spectrum, dyslexia and more.
You know, think about what it's like sitting, crawling, kneeling. Think about what you're forcing people to do. Here's a small video from just the frustration of not being able to reach these objects up on the table. Our user, he's in a wheelchair; he also has low vision and also mobility and disabilities in his hands. As well, he was okay with the controllers. We added padding on the floor. And if you have a VR lab or a dedicated space, I suggest you get some of that
soft foam padding that children's areas have, because there's a lot of movement in crawling and rolling around in VR and sometimes you just want to sit down. The power of inclusive design – *Design for one, extend to many* as Microsoft says. It turns out that 3D sound and designing just the sound part of your experience to begin with can be really, really powerful.
And a lot of people in VR forget about the power of sound. So, if you even crafted the sound aspect of your experience first and then added the visual piece, you're going to be stronger because the sound is 50% of your narrative, emotion, navigation, presence. It's a huge, huge important thing. And for folks that are blind, it's the only way they can navigate.