Advertisements have become commonplace on modern websites. While ads are typically designed for visual consumption, it is unclear how they affect blind users who interact with the ads using a screen reader. Existing research studies on non-visual web interaction predominantly focus on general web browsing; the specific impact of extraneous ad content on blind users’ experience remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we conducted an interview study with 18 blind participants; we found that blind users are often deceived by ads that contextually blend in with the surrounding web page content. While ad blockers can address this problem via a blanket filtering operation, many websites are increasingly denying access if an ad blocker is active.
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Detecting Deceptive Dark-Pattern Web Advertisements for Blind Screen-Reader Users
It is found that blind users are often deceived by ads that contextually blend in with the surrounding web page content, so a detection model is built that leverages a multi-modal combination of handcrafted and automatically extracted features to determine if a particular ad is contextually deceptive.