Coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, the metaverse is a contested term that is still being defined. Corporate jockeying over ownership of the term highlights the political stakes of virtual tools generating new worlds. The CripTech Metaverse Lab conceives of the metaverse broadly as the ecosystem of extended reality technologies that reflect, project and interact with the world we know. Stephenson described the sensory aspirations of the metaverse in his description of avatars as “audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other.” Yet, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and spatial audio present significant access frictions and communication barriers for disabled users and creators.