Accessible Design for Varied Sensory Wayfinding in Virtual Spaces
Creators: name: Mason, Zach
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2025
Subjects: accessibility
audio
blind navigation
game
design research
research through design
navigation
digital
wayfinding
sensory

description: The research within this thesis is, in of itself an example of the power
 of Research through Design (RtD). It began as an introspective exploration
 around how virtual wayfinding systems could provide an enjoyable sense of
 togetherness during the COVID-19 pandemic, evolving into an exploration of
 others, considering how designing wayfinding experiences with their unique
 needs in mind can provide far greater accessibility, legibility,
 togetherness, and immersion. This research, enacted through the process of
 designing and redesigning, is a window into the research process I began
 long before my PhD, and one I intend to continue after its concluding
 statements.
 
 
 Researching ‘Accessible Design for Varied Sensory Wayfinding in Virtual
 Spaces', this thesis unearths that while legibility and accessible
 design are inherently intertwined, universal legibility in virtual
 wayfinding is never truly achievable due to people's varying sensory
 bandwidths, digital experience and intended usage. This research is both
 an exploration of wayfinding, and a wayfinding journey itself,
 demonstrated through its intentional drifting methods and wayfinding
 focused research aims respectively. Conveyed across three specific
 sections – focusing on over-specificity, ambiguity, and legibility through
 accessibility – this thesis uses wayfinding games as a vessel for research
 exploration throughout. Section zero lays the foundations of this research
 journey, outlining the methods, epistemologies and designs which inspired
 and were enacted throughout the three following sections. Level 1 is often
 where games really begin (after the tutorial). To pay homage to this and
 highlight that section 1 is where my data chapters begin (and that the
 section before is really the foundations to it) I labelled the preceding
 section to it as 0.
 
 
 Section one focuses on over-specificity and documents a process of
 learning how to design virtual spaces that involve wayfinding, before
 highlighting that its largely game-centric underpinning would benefit from
 broader consideration of people and their understandings of virtual
 spaces.
 
 
 Section two extends this thinking by exploring the design of virtual
 public spaces intended for general audiences, created during the pandemic.
 It looks at how game-like interactive systems collide with design patterns
 from general purpose video conferencing to create ambiguous and hard to
 navigate spaces, especially for those with visual impairments.
 
 
 The third section explores legibility within virtual wayfinding, using the
 design and development of an audio-only game to uncover how accessibility
 might improve virtual wayfinding more generally and what the limits of
 non-visual wayfinding are within generically designed hardware. The final
 concluding section questions what this explorative journey has taught me,
 and what within it might be of use to others.
 
 
 Finally, it examines how future research might begin to erode the
 limitations of non-visual virtual wayfinding caused by generic
 hardware's sensory bandwidth limits. These sections can broadly be
 broken down into these research questions:
 
 
 0. How can we unpack the history of virtual wayfinding design?
 
 1. What is the design of virtual wayfinding spaces with current tools
 like?
 
 2. How do we design virtual wayfinding spaces for maximum accessibility?
 
 3. How could virtual wayfinding spaces be made more accessible?
 
 4. Is equitable access to virtual space fixable by hardware redesign?