Accessibility in identity and privacy protection mechanisms for Web applications

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This research program's objectives are to develop methods and technologies that address scientific problems in providing accessibility in identity and data protection mechanisms for Web-based applications, and to contribute new international technical standards in the space. Briefly, accessibility, in the context of the Web, means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, authenticate, navigate, interact, state preferences, give consent, and successfully transact with online applications. Today, most existing identity and privacy mechanisms fare poorly on accessibility; picture the difficulty that a user with a visual disability has in deciphering the common Web CAPTCHA where they are asked to re-type the distorted and misaligned characters shown to them in a text box. Moreover, robust identity mechanisms, such as two-factor authentication, are becoming increasingly required in practice. This trend means that the process for a user with disabilities to identify her/himself to a system is becoming more complex, thereby making some systems more inaccessible. Major technical problems in providing accessible identity and data protection mechanisms include challenges (1) to provide high levels of dynamic and robust customization within security and privacy mechanisms for the user with a disability, (2) to keep user accessibility preferences private and secure when users interact with such mechanisms, and (3) to scale integrated accessibility/privacy and accessibility/identity solutions. Further, organizations tend to adopt cost-effective technologies, and so a further difficult requirement in the complex Web domain is (4) to ensure our technologies are cost-aware. To tackle these problems, my research intends to use the flexible, integrative power of the Web Services and service oriented architecture paradigms, declarative rules-driven approaches, and new statistical optimization approaches to offer viable and needed solutions. Our results can potentially provide the millions of people with disabilities worldwide with new technologies for vastly easier but yet secure and private access to their data and organizations' data, and will enable organizations to provide more inclusive online services and workplaces.