“As Usual, I Needed Assistance of a Seeing Person”: Experiences and Challenges of People with Disabilities and Authentication Methods

According to the World Health organization, about 16% of the world’s population live with a disability. While they could benefit from digital products and services, users with disabilities often face severe accessibility issues: tasks can only be completed with difficulty, a considerable investment of time, or with assistance of technologies or other people. Further, to access these products and services, they need to authenticate. The accessibility of authentication methods for users with disabilities has not been studied in depth. We use an accessible study design to conduct 13 semi-structured interviews with people with physical, hearing, visual, cognitive, or multiple impairments to better understand the accessibility issues they face when using knowledge- or token-based, and biometric authentication. Our qualitative content analysis shows that none of the commonly available authentication methods is fully accessible to participants, causing them to abandon services or develop workarounds that reduce their own security and privacy. Our results also reveal the role of assistive technologies and human assistants in the authentication experience of users with disabilities. We conclude by encouraging fellow researchers and practitioners to reflect on assisted access when designing security mechanisms, to include people with disabilities using accessible study designs, and to keep in mind that accessible security is about more than usability – to further benefit users without disabilities as well.