The metaverse is quickly taking shape amid a growing movement to ensure virtual worlds are accessible to users with disabilities.

Meta (formerly known as Facebook) offers accessibility guidelines for software developers creating apps for its virtual reality headsets. The rules could help shape the network of 3D virtual worlds, focused on the social connection that forms the metaverse. But observers say more needs to be done.

“Everyone has a different set of abilities, from very poor vision to very good vision, excellent hearing to completely deaf, and so on,” Joe Devon, co-founder of Diamond, a digital agency focused on accessibility, told Lifewire in an email interview. “If you design virtual reality to work well for people with disabilities, you’re automatically going to create affordances for older people, for people with mobility issues, for people in wheelchairs, and you’re going to have a much better product for every user.”

There’s a huge potential audience for an accessible metaverse, Svetlana Kouznetsova, an accessibility consultant who is deaf, said via email. About 1.85 billion people worldwide live with disabilities, a group larger than the population of China.