There's a meaningful difference between designing technology for a group of people and designing it with them.
Our collaboration with Ysgol Y Deri in Penarth - the UK's largest SEN school - is grounded in that distinction. Students didn't test the product at the end. They shaped it from the beginning.
What co-creation actually looks like
Students took on the role of game testers and co-creators. They played early prototypes, identified what confused or frustrated them, and watched their feedback reflected in the next version. Over successive sessions, they developed genuine ownership of the project.
This isn't just ethically better than traditional user testing - it produces better technology. Students with complex needs are often the most demanding users in the best possible sense: if something is unclear, inaccessible or poorly designed, they'll tell you immediately, often in ways that are difficult to misinterpret.
The accessibility challenges VR poses
VR makes specific demands that mainstream design rarely considers:
- Sensory sensitivity - brightness, audio levels, visual transitions can all cause overload if they're not configurable
- Motor control - standard VR interactions assume a range of physical capability that many users don't have
- Cognitive load - complex menus, long onboarding sequences and unclear goals create barriers before the experience has even started
- Session length - many students engage well in short bursts but struggle with sustained immersion
Each of these became a design consideration rather than an edge case.
What the students told us
Three consistent themes came out of the classroom sessions.
First, control matters more than features. The ability to pause, adjust and navigate without friction made the difference between an experience students could engage with and one that overwhelmed them.
Second, predictability reduces anxiety. Knowing what was coming next - consistent transitions, stable audio, familiar interface patterns - allowed students to focus on the experience rather than manage their response to uncertainty.
Third, being a contributor changes everything. Students who had shaped the product engaged with it differently from those who simply used it. The sense of authorship was tangible, and it extended beyond the sessions themselves.
Why this matters for immersive technology broadly
The accessibility barriers in VR don't only affect SEN users. They affect anyone whose needs fall outside the narrow assumptions built into most hardware and software. Designing inclusively from the start - not retrofitting accessibility later - produces better experiences for everyone.
This project has directly informed our work on Openality, our ongoing R&D programme into inclusive VR design, supported by Media Cymru. If you're working in education, healthcare or any field where immersive technology could make a real difference to people who are currently excluded from it, we'd genuinely like to hear from you.