CAREER: Inclusive Privacy: Effective Privacy Management for People with Visual Impairments

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This project aims to provide people with disabilities, particularly those with visual impairments, better privacy tools when working with computers. Although information privacy is a concern for everyone, common tools such as spam-detecting captchas, password strength meters, security alert messages, and browser icons that indicate secure connections are often designed without considering people with visual impairments and thus are hard for this group to use. Meanwhile, common workarounds such as audio screen readers and requests for help from other people come with their own privacy risks. To better understand the privacy challenges people with visual impairments face, the researchers will first study their use of and known privacy concerns around technologies. They will then work with people with visual impairments to generate, test, and improve a number of design ideas that might address those challenges and concerns. Finally, they will work to generalize the studies and designs to other populations, including older adults who might have different privacy expectations than younger people as well as people with cognitive impairments. The research will lead to a better understanding of privacy needs across the population, as well as "inclusive" designs for privacy management tools that can be better not just for underserved populations but for all people. To spread the knowledge and increase the impact of the work, the team will hold workshops at relevant research communities and with local disability groups, as well as develop course materials on inclusive and accessible privacy for the Security Education (SEED) labs program that is widely used in education. The research is organized around three main phases. The first phase aims to learn more about the privacy needs of people with visual impairments through a combination of longitudinal diary studies, in which people record and answer questions about incidents where they felt their privacy was at risk, and observational studies of people with visual impairments and their help givers using technology in context. The second phase looks to develop better privacy support tools; the team will focus first on privacy threat reminders and tools for privacy-respecting collaborative use as these are key issues that arose in preliminary work, but will also develop tools in response to the concerns identified in the first phase. In each design activity, the researchers will use a participatory design approach that includes people with visual impairments (and when appropriate their help givers) on the design team, working together at both local disability support centers and at the research lab. Designs will follow a standard iterative process, starting with initial requirements generation and review, moving through brainstorming and low-fidelity prototypes, and finally developing and testing high-fidelity prototypes. The third phase involves using the results from the first two phases to generate guidelines for inclusive privacy design -- that is, general privacy guidelines that may apply to a wide range of user populations with varying abilities. To do this, the team will conduct research similar to phase one, but with groups of older adults, people with cognitive impairments, and a group of younger people without disabilities; they will also test the privacy tools generated in phase two with these groups to both identify new issues that arise in these populations and modify the tools to be more broadly inclusive.