Allgemein

As half of project time is almost over, the current status of the projects was presented on April 21 at the netidee Spring Talk 2015. The progress reports and the subsequent networking gave a good overview about the running projects and possible synergies between BlindFaith and other projects about accessibility for blind and visually impaired users (Nearspeak) and tracking blockers (upribox).
Link to the netIdee Spring Talk 2015

We are happy that BlindFaith was mentioned among other projects in an article about the event by the Austrian daily news paper “Der Standard”.
Link to the arcticle “Halftime at netidee: Privacy-box, encryption and anti-terror law (in German)

In the April issue of the magazine “Sichtweisen” an article about the goals and current activities in the BlindFaith Project was released.

The article (in German) can be accessed under – BlindFaith article – “Sichtweisen” magazine

 

 

On February 17 and 19 two workshops with altogether 11 blind and visually impaired internet users have taken place at the premises of the Hilfsgemeinschaft.

In these workshops we discussed the following questions with the users:

1. Which privacy concerns do blind and visually impaired internet users have while surfing the web?
2. How do blind and visually impaired users cope with existing risks?
3. Which privacy enhancing tools do blind and visually impaired people know and use and which characteristics should such tools have?

The results of the workshops are currently analysed and provide a strong basis for further steps of the requirements analysis. As a next step we will conduct behaviour observations and individual interviews. In strong cooperation with the users we will evaluate existing privacy enhancing tools and check their accessibility.

We looked into the accessibility of existing Privacy Enhancing Tool, to use them later in our user behaviour study. We focused on tracking blocker tools that block beacons, trackers, cookies, etc. and thus prevent behavioural analysis and behavioural targeting.

Our analysis showed that Ghostery is the most accessible tool. Thus Ghostery will be used for demonstration in the requirements analysis and user behaviour study.

The following table provides an overview of the analysed tools:

Name	Accessibility	Open Source	Supported browser
Ghostery	The plugin can be accessed by keyboard. Alt+Strg+G opens the menu, which can be navigated with the keyboard also. It is interpreted and read correctly by the screenreader (NVDA). Only the old version of the menu is accessible, the new version is not completely accessible.	Nein	Firefox Chrome Opera Safari Internet Explorer
Privacy Badger	Not accessible by keyboard only. This was also confirmed by the developers on the mailing list. Nevertheless the Pirvacy Project stated interest in improving the accessibility. Blind Faith was invited to support the accessibility status of the Privacy badger tool with the results of the project.	Ja	Firefox Chrome
DisconnectMe	No information about keyboard accessibility found. An e-mail to support has so far remained unanswered.	Ja	Firefox Chrome Internet Explorer Safari Opera
Blur	No information about keyboard accessibility found. An e-mail to support has so far remained unanswered.	Nein	Firefox Chrome Opera Safari

 

The winners of the 9th netidee call were presented on November 20 at the Viennese “Museumsquartier”. Of course BlindFaith was present as well and used the opportunity for presenting the project to the public. Moreover it was very interesting to get to know the other founded projects and engage in interesting discussions.

A successful event, that motivated us to dive into project work!

(Foto: netidee | Thomas Peintinger)