Write a PREreview

Everyday, people regularly log into websites and applications without too much thought for the process and with an end-goal or task in mind to be achieved with the service that they are accessing. In many cases this is not an issue, but some people find this step hard, frustrating, or virtually impossible. For people who have a disability, complications can arise in this process, and we examine the nature of these problems, not only to create an empirical record but also with a view to diagnosing and to reme-diate limiting factors. A series of interviews (n=15) is analyzed with Grounded Theory (GT) coding to produce a set of theorems directly from applying Constructivist princi-ples to the data. As anticipated, results illustrate that most disabled users find that their capability to authenticate effectively is reduced due to various accessibility bar-riers. By way of inductive theorem building, this paper categorizes common traits that participants have revealed during interviews. The main goal of this paper is to lead the way towards the development of a Framework which suggests ways in which to rem-edy the root causes of these accessibility complications that hinder our disabled com-munity. It was noted during the study that most participants felt hindered when log-ging in due to their disability, which could imply a lack of accessibility for those using traditional authentication techniques. Also, maintaining security was found to be im-portant, so future work should find ways to make sure that disabled users are not left vulnerable when improving usability for them.