Starbucks Kindness campaign WebAR app
In partnership with Tool of North America, this web app was built for Starbucks to help customers share acts of kindness and celebrate baristas as part of a nationwide campaign. Visitors accessed the app by scanning QR codes placed in every Starbucks store in the US (over 16,000!).
My role in the project was to create a way for visitors to access all of the content and features available in AR even if they can’t (or don’t want to) use their camera or physically move their phone around. Although this is most useful for visitors with disabilities, it’s also useful for anyone with an older phone or who just doesn’t feel like waving their phone around in a public place.
For the Starbucks team, accessibility was a must-have for this project. But there’s just one small problem: there is currently no practical way to make AR accessible for disabled users. It requires users to both see the screen and physically move their phone to access content, which inherently means users with vision or motion impairments are excluded from the experience.
Currently, the technology just does not exist yet to convey interactive spatial experiences to common assistive technologies like screen readers, so instead I built an alternative UI that conforms to WCAG 2.1 level AA, allowing anyone to access all the same content and features in a more typical 2D format. Users could seamlessly switch between the AR and non-AR versions at any time with a toggle switch, depending on their needs.
