Virtual Guidedog

Hi. Welcome to one of the pages relating to Virtual Guidedog. On this wiki page I'm guessing in the future you will find information about the team behind Virtual Guidedog, news updates and useful links, as well as any other random things the team decides to put in.

The point of this wiki is as a central way for the team to share information and more easily collaborate.

So to start at the beginning, who are we all and what is Virtual guidedog. Well to put it simply, Virtual guidedog is an attempt by a small group of Second life users to improve access to Second Life for disabled users. The first focus of the project is going to be on blind users of Second life, however the goal of the team is to later on expand and encompass as wide a range of disabilities as possible.

I know your thinking at this point, what do I mean access to Second life? well, take a blind user. At the moment, a blind user is unable to use Second life without help for several reasons. Firstly, Second life is almost entirely mouse driven, at least for interacting with the world, so we would like to give keyboard control over your avatar to a user. Next, a blind user would find it impossible to navigate in Second life using the regular client, because he/she would have no feedback as to what was around them or where they were, so the current thinking of the team is to allow a person to find there way around with stereo sound and other helpful messages. One fundamental problem the blind user experiences, is that it is currently impossible to log into Second life using the keyboard, and worse that screen readers, (a program to turn text on the screen into artificial speech) will not work with the log in prompt.

We are planning to address these issues with a custom built Second life client, and a collection of scripts called max, these will eventually assist with navigation around the world, and reading messages and information with text to speech technology.

So for the moment, what can virtual guidedog do? Well at the moment, it is undergoing very early development, we're just having fun getting the client to compile. We're a very small group, and I guess we could always do with more help, particularly on the programming front.

Questions or Comments

If you have any questions or comments please don't hesitate to contact us.

IT Manager and Lead Developer:

Charles Mountain

Links and Places

Working Documents:

• Virtual Guidedog Issues and Solutions

Related Pages:

• SL Accessibility
• Virtual Guidedog Site

Friends of Virtual Guidedog:

• Mental Mentors
• SecondAbility Mentors