Challenges with Electronic Identity Authentication: A Qualitative Study with Disabled Participants

This research paper address why it is that disabled people often have extra problems with authentication (i.e. logging in to online services). While the focus is on authenti-cation, we also explore its relevance to electronic identification and consider the post-authentication stage of authorization (allowing continued use of the service once logged in). While ‘normal’ people regularly log into websites and applications without too much thought for the process with an end-goal or task in mind to be achieved with the service that they are accessing. We discover how there is a societal gap in terms of ease-of-use, as previous studies show that disabled people can find this step difficult, frustrating, or virtually impossible. For people who have a disability, complications will arise in this process, and we examine the nature of these problems identified by this group. identifying patterns in the A series of interviews (n=15) are analyzed with Constructivist Grounded Theory methods to discover patterns in the participant’s answers and build a theory about why Accessible Authentication is a problem. By way of inductive theorem building, this paper categorizes common traits that participants have revealed during interviews. The key findings reveal that most disabled users say that their capability to authenticate effectively is effectively reduced by accessibility barriers, in other words, participants felt hindered when logging in because of their disability. This leads us to conclude with some degree of confidence that there is a lack of accessibility for those using traditional authentication techniques. A further area of concern for the participants suggests that maintaining security alongside ease-of-use was found to be important to them, so future work on improving accessibility should find ways to ensure that disabled users’ information is not left vulnerable.