junebug codes

View Ongoing Project

Furthering websites as installation art, accessible immersive media, and hybrid listening environments.

From April:

Through the Develop Your Creative Practice grant, I am building a toolkit for artists, web developers, and musicians to build immersive experiences accessible to screen readers in the browser. This approach aims to utilize open web standards to enable myself and others to create websitec installations that allow for hybridity with in-person immersive installations like projections and speaker arrays.

I see an opportunity to develop technology for accessible, web-based immersive audio. Using the 3D Javascript library Three.js, a spatial audio library (JSAmbisonics), and the WebXR framework A-Frame, I want to explore the development of creating spatial audio experiences on the web. I want to consider keyboards, screen readers, game controllers, and mobile phones as alternatives to headsets. I wish to write open-source code for software and existing hardware, and begin a blog as a resource for creating immersive audio content for the web.

With this development opportunity I hope to make immersive media creation more accessible for digital and sound artists. Web-based immersive media is still in its infancy, and there will be more opportunities to provide services for theatre companies, venues, digital agencies, musical instrument manufacturers, and game studios. I intend to develop more tools for artists who work with immersive sound for film, ambisonics, game audio, and future audiovisual technologies.

From September:

In July, I began the testing and development sessions with 5 artists who responded to the open call. Each artist had varying levels of experience with digital technology, and by chance it produced a very diverse set of people, across age range, technical ability, and device preference. One of the sessions was remote, as one artist lived in Wales and I had assistance from her PA, who was sighted. One artist was sighted and used other kinds of browser tools, the others had varying levels of sight, each with their own methods with navigating phones and desktop devices.

I found these sessions to be the real work of the project, testing my abilities to accommodate and understand our transit systems, and my patience with how frustrating and difficult screenreaders are, let alone designing for. Voiceover on IOS and Mac is decent enough, and Talkback less so, but these technologies are still like adding a wheelchair ramp with a 20 degree incline so the building is ADA ‘compliant’. They’re an afterthought; I struggled even as a developer to understand what was happening and I had to constantly figure out what went wrong after each session was over.

Every artist I worked with was a delight and was much more patient than I. Lynn, a career artist and audio description expert, had strong experience with immersive technology and helped me through a lot of my mistakes in understanding screen readers. Net, a recent graduate from the Royal College of Arts, assisted me as a sighted participant to provide feedback on how the experience feels as a specialist in digital art and experiential design. A blind theatremaker (anonymous), had wonderful ideas about the applications of the software, from orchestra to the supermarket. Karina, an actor and aerialist who had never used a game controller, headset, or binaural audio before, had found serious interest in using the Xbox controller to navigate quickly through virtual space. Tafsila, who attended sessions remotely, hopes to use this technology in the future for “touch tours” for improving access to theatre.
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