> A user's view of Second Life
- 24 May 07, 12:08 PM
One of our readers, miika, has shared with us their thoughts on Second Life. Have you had similar experiences with the vitual world? Lets us know your thoughts on virtual reality games.
Much has been said about Linden Labs' virtual world, Second Life. From a disability point of view, the world could be said to have a great deal of benefits, turning the name into something that could be considered accurate for many with disabilities - Second Life offered an alternative way to get out and see the world.
Unfortunately, it appears Linden Labs doesn't have anyone thinking about that potential. The new user interface currently in Beta certainly wasn't designed with accessibility in mind, creating a far more complicated and less intuitive chat interface, and adding to the stresses the client places on computers with features that might not be of any use, such as the new voice chat.
When the subject of Second Life has come up, one of the responses has been that it's for "people who have no lives to begin with". For certain parts of the disability community, Second Life had the potential to offer them a window on the world to add to their lives (and, for those who are housebound or otherwise blocked from being able to interact with the "real" world, it's entirely fair to say that Second Life, and virtual worlds like it, -is- a way to "get a life"). Despite the PR machine surrounding this particular world, however, it seems obvious that the benefits in that regard it had to offer for the disability community are being tossed aside in favour of pretty bells and whistles for the "broader target audience".
Once more we're seeing that the disability community is totally overlooked. To give Linden Labs the benefit of the doubt, it's unlikely that they've even considered the potential benefits of Second Life to people with disabilities, but at the same time that lack of awareness is indicative of the sidelining of the community by software developers in the main.
For some reason, software developers fail to grasp the concept that usability is not an undue burden. Surely what is accessible for the broadest possible spectrum of disabled users is going to be equally usable by those who don't have such challenges? Creating a plugins mechanism so that only those features that are usable by the disabled community need to be loaded, reducing the overhead on the system, is equally of benefit to the rest of the users, who might not want some of the features?
There are other Virtual World systems on the internet - Wikipedia lists "Active Worlds, there, and newcomers such as Entropia Universe, Dotsoul Cyberpark, Red Light Center, and Kaneva". Active Worlds similarly does not have any real accessibility (one of the reasons I stopped using it for Second Life). I wonder how many of them even bother to remember that we are out here, or the benefits their systems could offer to us, if the developers for once would think about it.
Art imitates life. In this case, in Second Life, we're still Second Class.
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The Second Life client is open source software which means you or anyone else is free to make modifications. I'm not suggesting that this excuses the original developers from ignoring accessibility, but at least there is hope that modded versions may be developed.
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