Putting XR Accessibility First, with CNIB’s Yvonne Felix

XR tech often has a visual focus, but we have to be careful in that line of thinking; those who are visually impaired might be left out of the conversation otherwise. Yvonne Felix, an inclusion expert at CNIB, knows from experience that the visually impaired - or anyone with any impairment - don’t have to be excluded from XR; we just have to be forward-thinking and make accessibility considerations to include users from all walks of life.

Julie: Hello, my name is Julie Smithson, and I am your XR for Learning podcast host. Today, I look forward to bringing you insight into changing the way we learn and teach using XR technologies to explore, enhance, and individualize learning for everyone. Today, my guest is Yvonne Felix, who works with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind in the Accessibility and Inclusion Division as an experienced community specialist, with a demonstrated history of working in the medical industry. Thank you so much for joining me today, Yvonne. I'm really, really excited to have you here.

Yvonne: Thank you, Julie. I'm very excited, too.

Julie: Let's start with your role at CNIB. We've had several conversations over the last year just on-- a little bit about immersive technologies and how it affects people with disabilities, such as being visually impaired. And maybe we can start off with what your role is and, of course, how you got involved.

Yvonne: Sure. First, I'll start by just sort of explaining why I wanted to work at CNIB and actually how I became interested and involved in assistive technology, and also life changing technology in general. So I was born with an eye disease called Stargardt's, and it primarily affects your central vision loss. So in the center of your eye, in your macula, you have your rods and cones. And basically, it sends a message to say that I don't need those photoreceptors for my central vision to work. So it's considered sort of an autoimmune disease. But over the years -- as I did lose my central vision fully by the time I was seven -- I learned that I would just have the type of life that required me to use technology. And so it was just really embedded in my day-to-day. I thought everybody's life was like that. I think I was in the timeframe of the world where technology was becoming very advanced very quickly. I have partial sight, compared to total blindness, and the differences I identify with using my sight. So there are many people that still do have some sight left, but they don't use it. So it's the same partial sight just identified, that I do use the sight that I do have left, in comparison to using other devices that focus on sight substitution as opposed to sight enhancement. So that's how I got involved in CNIB. My role really is about inclusion and accessibility. And accessibility is a component of inclusion. You can take accessibility and it's just one building block to other components that make inclusion a universally accessible culture, as opposed to just focusing on accessibility as one thing that you need to embed. It's just one small part of looking at that bigger picture of universal design.

Julie: And this is where we start to talk about immersive technologies becoming-- providing superpowers to those like yourself, who are visually impaired. And being able to substitute and to assist you in day-to-day situations and present this technology in a way to help you get through your days in places where it can help you being immersed into something. So it's really interesting how all of this digital technology in the last couple of years kind of compounded just recently with COVID-19. And maybe you can speak to how the organization is adjusting to becoming remote, and what that baseline was like for the CNIB to be able to convert, and where you play a role in that.

Yvonne: Sure. Our organizatio