I'm glad it's tracked, but I wonder how many years until they actually start to do anything.

Frankly, I'm so exhausted of this pattern I've been seeing with VRChat's development priorities as of late. The order seems to always be:

- Ship a new feature for monetization,

- Discover a bunch of accessibility concerns it creates, and

- Ignore those and charge forward to the next monetization opportunity.

I've seen it enough to recognize it as a clear pattern of priorities. It's very clear to me as a lifelong accessibility advocate that inclusion and accessibility are for VRChat development.

From a business standpoint, I almost get it. Folks with disabilities don't make up a big slice of the pie, so we aren't enough of a market share to really move the needle, so our concerns are sidelined as they're often more work.

What the business critters at VRC are forgetting, though, is two important details:

1) Almost everyone in the VRC communities I frequent either is, knows, or has heard of someone using the application living with some disability. VRC is a safe escape where we can craft experiences that include people who would normally be excluded from IRL versions of those same experiences, so naturally this attracts a fair number of folks living with disabilities. You can only sideline the concerns of these people for so long before them, their friends and their peers start to wonder why they're helping fund an operation that excludes people they care about.

and

2) Accessibility, almost universally, benefits far more people than just the folks who absolutely need, for reasons of disability, to disable a toggle or customize a feature. For every one person who requires that toggle, there are a dozen or more who simply that experience and find it more pleasant or relaxing to them. Building in those additional settings helps more and more people feel "at home" in your user interface, with very few (if any) downsides.

I am not fundamentally opposed in any way to the idea of VRC monetizing its platform so it can keep the lights on, recruit and retain quality staff, and build out new features, but I strongly oppose any notion that in order to do that, one must sacrifice inclusion and accessibility. It is absolutely not necessary to throw people like me under the bus to achieve your goals, and I think the fact that this continues to happen with these newly rolled-out features is a big part of why it's so difficult for me and my peers to truly feel excited about anything new coming out of VRC.

Great example of the accessibility issue that custom profile themes bring with it.

Giving every user a 'Profile override' check that forces it to match the rest of their color scheme, and means to set that color-scheme arbitrarily are the bare minimum for accessibility.

It's really frustrating that y'all don't seem to want to add a setting to disable this. I have friends who are visually impaired and I can guarantee that this will make their VRChat experience much worse. There is no reason leave out a setting to disable this.

Any sort of affecs that display that overlays text makes it hard for me to read. It can also hurt my eyes alot from strain.

I have dsylexia and i already have a hard time reading text in VR (and i have a BSB2e which has no SDE, so it's not because of my headset), the different colors themselves aren't that much of a problem for me so far but the profile effect animations make it nearly impossible for me to read a profile while in VR...

Please add an accessibility toggle, i beg you. Accessibility standards for exist for a reason... please follow them!

Who approved this absolute garbage anyway?

My god, if the vomit inducing Discord design wasn't enough it also has reading issues. I can barely read on my 24' 1080p monitor.

Why releases shit like this?

The amount of things they glossed over and didn’t think about before pushing this update is actually awful. Yes, Unity‑6 runs a bit better, but that didn’t require a whole redesign of the menu and profile system. Just because you can update something because you personally think it’s better doesn’t mean the player base or community feels the same way. It honestly feels like the people who decided this was a “good idea” knew very well their wallets would like it more than the players they were pushing it onto.

The redesign does nothing for the social tabs other than complicate the way things look, feel, and function. Even the redesign of the overhead nameplate is not well thought through; people’s group statuses and pronouns are all squished together, making them harder to see and read. For a game named after talking and finding friends on a VR platform, the decision to add features that shouldn’t—and are not—the main focus of the gameplay leaves a bad aftertaste and an even worse outlook on the direction the developers are actively taking the game.

Just saw the new nameplates/profile icons on the website because I think a dev made an oopsie and forgot to turn them off, which I assume will be added later, forcing them on everyone without even offering a way to disable them is a baffling decision.