Breaking Barriers in the Metaverse: A Comprehensive Exploration of Accessibility for Users with Disabilities

In the post-pandemic era, more and more people are turning to virtual spaces for entertainment, work, education, and social interaction. Despite this enthusiasm, serious concerns have arisen regarding the accessibility and inclusion of people with disabilities in educational settings and how Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches can mitigate these issues in the new digital realm. In this article, we conduct a systematic literature review (SRL) to identify the set of challenges that people and students with disabilities encounter when they are interested in accessing the metaverse. We collect solutions proposed in the literature to provide a comprehensive understanding of the accessibility of current metaverse platforms. We distill a number of take-away messages encouraging researchers and practitioners to further work on the proposed solution, leveraging AI to monitor and enable people with disabilities to fully enjoy the metaverse experience.