Exploring Accessibility Features in SeekBeak: Making 360° Content More Inclusive

Abstract

Immersive 360° media is changing how educators engage learners in experiences such as virtual field trips, lab simulations, and career-exploration experiences, yet accessibility for learners with disabilities is often an afterthought. This article describes accessibility features built into SeekBeak, a cloud-based platform for authoring interactive 360° content. It shows how they are used in two-year college technician education and K-12 career exploration. These features include keyboard navigation across the full interface, hotspot shortcut keys, joystick and adaptive-controller input, and a tap-and-hold gesture for touch devices. A text viewer that presents hotspot content as structured text that works well with screen readers. The work draws on immersive career-exploration tours produced by Be More Colorful, a Resource Collaborative for Immersive Technologies (RECITE) industry partner, that are deployed across more than 25 states. We map each feature to WCAG and UDL principles.