For the last two decades the field of usable security has spoken about the tension between security and usability. A huge army of researchers have worked tirelessly to improve the usability of security systems.
Yet we’ve missed a dimension or perhaps just not really given it equal stature: accessibility.
This week, the HAISA conference is running online, and I will be presenting a paper which raises this issue, specifically as it applies to dyslexia.
Dyslexia affects up to a fifth of people, and it is linked to difficulties in dealing with sequences of characters. Passwords are sequences of characters and numbers. Dyslexics are going to struggle with those.
Accessibility is a legal requirement for all online services. The vast majority of these mandate passwords. It is time to rethink this, to consider the accessibility challenge passwords constitute.
Karen Renaud, Graham Johnson and Jacques Ophoff. Dyslexia and Password Usage: Accessibility in Authentication Design HAISA 2020.