“I’m Stuck!”: A Contextual Inquiry of People with Visual Impairments in Authentication

Current authentication mechanisms pose significant challenges for people with visual impairments. This paper presents results from a contextual inquiry study that investigated the experiences this population encounters when logging into their computers, smart phones, and websites that they use. By triangulating results from observation, contextual inquiry interviews and a hierarchical task analysis of participants’ authentication tasks, we found that these users experience various difficulties associated with the limitations of assistive technologies, suffer noticeable delays in authentication and fall prey to confusing login challenges. The hierarchical task analysis uncovered challenging and time-consuming steps in the authentication process that participants performed. Our study raises awareness of these difficulties and reveals the limitations of current authentication experiences to the security community. We discuss implications for designing accessible authentication experiences for people with visual impairments.