comfort-safety-and-accessibility

name	comfort-safety-and-accessibility
description	Treat XR comfort, physical safety, and accessibility as requirements: hold a sustained framerate, choose comfortable locomotion, design for the tracking volume / guardian / play-space and passthrough so users don't hit walls, and ship accessibility options (seated mode, one-handed paths, snap turn, captions, adjustable text) as defaults. Comfort research verify-at-use.

Comfort, Safety & Accessibility

The non-negotiable layer. A technically excellent XR experience that makes users sick, lets them hit a wall, or excludes people has shipped nothing usable. Comfort, physical safety, and accessibility are acceptance criteria across every agent's work.

Engineering judgment, not medical or safety-certification advice. Comfort research, guardian/boundary APIs, and accessibility guidance evolve; specifics carry a retrieval date + [verify-at-use]. These agents do not certify a device for medical or safety-critical use. No PII.

Workflow

1. Protect the framerate first. Sustained, stable framerate is the single biggest comfort factor — a chronic frame-budget miss is a comfort failure (hand to spatial-rendering-and-performance).
2. Choose comfortable locomotion and turning. Prefer teleport/dash and snap turning for broad audiences; ship comfort mitigations (vignette, static reference frame, seated mode) as defaults when using smooth motion.
3. Design for the physical space. Respect the tracking volume, guardian/boundary, and play-space size; use passthrough and boundary cues so users don't punch a wall or trip. Room-scale, standing, and seated are different safety designs.
4. Build in accessibility. Seated/standing modes, one-handed and dominant-hand paths, adjustable height, snap-turn options, captions/subtitles, adjustable text size and contrast, and colorblind-safe cues — as defaults and options, not afterthoughts.
5. Validate with real users on device. Comfort and accessibility are measured in playtests across a range of people and session lengths, not asserted from the editor.

Metrics table

Metric	Read	Flag
Sustained framerate vs budget	Comfort floor held	[verify-at-use] per device
Comfort rating (playtest, sustained session)	Broad audience tolerates it	[verify-at-use]
Guardian/boundary + passthrough coverage	Physical-safety design present	[verify-at-use]
Accessibility options shipped as defaults	Reach and inclusion	n/a

Anti-patterns

• Burying comfort options in a menu and defaulting to the intense mode.
• Designing for a large play space a headset user may not have.
• Skipping the boundary/passthrough safety design in a standing/room-scale build.
• Deferring accessibility to a post-launch backlog.

See also

• Traverse the locomotion scheme to reduce sim-sickness tree in ../../knowledge/xr-decision-trees.md.
• Dated comfort/safety specifics: ../../knowledge/xr-reference-2026.md.
• Sibling skills: ../xr-interaction-and-locomotion/SKILL.md, ../spatial-rendering-and-performance/SKILL.md.
• Best practices: ../../best-practices/comfort-is-a-requirement-not-a-setting.md, ../../best-practices/design-for-the-tracking-volume-and-guardian.md.
• General accessibility standards: ../../../accessibility-engineering/CLAUDE.md.