Accessible VR Clinical Research Toolkit

About this toolkit

The toolkit translates the Accessible Adaptive VR framework into practical steps, checklists, forms, and safeguards that research teams can adapt to their own protocols. It treats accessibility as a prospective research-design responsibility rather than a problem addressed only after enrollment, and applies to immersive VR, wearables, mobile applications, remote assessments, behavioral interventions, and other technology-assisted research.

Intended users: principal investigators, study coordinators, research assistants, accessibility leads, technology developers, facilitators, and community and lived-experience partners.

Scope: cross-disability — mobility and physical, vision, hearing, cognitive, intellectual and developmental, communication and speech, chronic illness and energy-limiting, mental-health, sensory, and multiple access needs, without assuming that one accommodation works for everyone.

Core principles

• Anticipate barriers

  Examine design, recruitment, consent, technology, procedures, data collection, and dissemination before participants encounter them.

• Ask rather than assume

  Provide a clear process for participants to describe access needs and preferred accommodations.

• Preserve participant control

  Define pause, stop, modification, and withdrawal pathways that are easy to use during technology-assisted procedures.

• Use lived experience

  Involve people with disabilities in identifying barriers, reviewing materials, and testing procedures.

• Interpret behavior cautiously

  Do not automatically assign psychological meaning to movement, posture, gaze, or response patterns that may reflect disability or assistive-technology use.

• Document and improve

  Turn recurring barriers and participant feedback into lasting protocol, technology, and training changes.

Implementation context

The framework’s initial implementation context is Skyward Sojourn, a virtual-reality exposure platform developed through NeuroViu. The earlier eight-participant Skyward Sojourn study established use of the underlying VR research environment; it was not designed to evaluate disability inclusion. The disability-inclusion framework described in the toolkit is being piloted and refined for subsequent research, and the toolkit will be updated as implementation lessons are documented.