Making Avatar Gaze Accessible for Blind and Low Vision People in Virtual Reality: Preliminary Insights

While VR is increasingly used for social interactions, it continues to be inaccessible for blind and low vision users. During such interactions, VR platforms allow users to communicate with naturalistic nonverbal cues, such as gaze, gestures, and body movements. In this work, we explored audio and haptic representations of gaze with a blind co-designer. We uncovered various preferences and recommendations for gaze representation. For example, receiving gaze information in multiple modalities was preferred, but audio feedback should be kept at a low volume to remain unobtrusive to conversations. Our work contributes design considerations to make gaze accessible in VR.