James M. Clarke

I am a third-year PhD student at the University of Surrey, working on the security and privacy of accessible technologies for people with visual impairments. Visual impairment is a broad term to describe any vision loss, ranging from partial vision loss to completed blindness. In the United Kingdom, there are more than 2 million people who have visual impairments, with around 60% of them being women. People with visual impairments have various tools called assistive technologies, which can help them use computers and access the Internet, such as screen readers.

My first paper examines the accessibility of cookie notices on top UK websites for users with visual impairments through system studies and a user study. This is vital research for this under-researched and marginalised user group. The results reveal that many cookie notices include accessibility issues, such as contrast problems, lack of headings, and delayed reading when the page loads. The study discusses the impact of these issues on user experience and privacy as well as providing recommendations for stakeholders to create more accessible websites and enhance privacy practices for users with visual impairments. Additionally, the user study indicates that individuals with visual impairments generally hold a negative perception of cookie notices, and they believe the suggested recommendations could improve their online experience. There is also a noted disparity between how users wish to respond to cookie notices and how they actually do in practice. %We are currently in discussion with W3C about updating the relevant standards.

At the time of writing, I recently finished working on a large-scale study of browser extensions, examining their tracking behaviours and accessibility impact. This research involved collecting over 21K web extensions and automatically visiting various honeypages. During this study, similarly to previous work, I found widespread tracking undertaken by a significant number of web extensions. Further, I found that a number of web extensions also directly impact the accessibility of a web page while in use, with a direct link between these extensions and those which perform tracking. Concurrently, I have been examining the security and privacy of screen readers and their associated plug-ins. This ongoing work has so far highlighted several security and privacy issues. As part of this project, I am actively collaborating with NV-access, makers of the leading screen reader, to design and guide the implantation of new security and privacy features. I hope this research is of interest to Brave, and I hope to implement similar research while on the internship. After my PhD, I intend to continue working on the security and privacy of underserved communities in the security world.