Accessibility in identity and privacy protection mechanisms for Web applications

该研究计划的目标是开发方法和技术，以解决为基于Web的应用程序提供身份和数据保护机制的可访问性方面的科学问题，并为该领域提供新的国际技术标准。简而言之，在Web环境中，无障碍性意味着残疾人可以感知、理解、验证、导航、交互、陈述偏好、给予同意并成功地与在线应用程序进行交易。今天，大多数现有的身份和隐私机制在可访问性方面表现不佳;想象一下视力残疾的用户在破译常见的Web CAPTCHA时的困难，他们被要求重新输入文本框中显示给他们的扭曲和错位的字符。此外，在实践中越来越需要稳健的身份机制，如双重认证。这一趋势意味着，残疾用户向系统识别自己的过程变得更加复杂，从而使一些系统更难使用。在提供无障碍身份和数据保护机制方面的主要技术问题包括以下挑战：（1）在安全和隐私机制内为残疾用户提供高水平的动态和稳健的定制化;（2）在用户与此类机制互动时，保持用户无障碍偏好的私密性和安全性;以及（3）扩展综合无障碍/隐私和无障碍/身份解决方案。此外，组织倾向于采用具有成本效益的技术，因此在复杂的Web领域中，更困难的要求是（4）确保我们的技术是成本敏感的。为了解决这些问题，我的研究打算使用Web服务和面向服务的架构范式，声明性规则驱动的方法，和新的统计优化方法的灵活性，综合的力量，提供可行的和需要的解决方案。我们的研究结果有可能为全球数百万残疾人提供新技术，使他们能够更轻松、安全和私密地访问自己的数据和组织的数据，并使组织能够提供更具包容性的在线服务和工作场所。

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.