Authentication is a mundane yet often integral part of people's experiences with computing devices and Internet services. Since most authentication mechanisms were designed without explicitly considering people with disabilities, these mechanisms may pose significant challenges for these users. In this paper, we report results from a contextual inquiry study on the authentication experiences and challenges of people with cognitive impairments. We identified a number of difficulties our participants experienced, such as remembering usernames and passwords, typing on the keyboard, logging out from their existing online accounts and being aware of errors. We hope the insights we found will indeed make future authentication systems more accessible and easier to use for users with cognitive impairments.

Visually impaired users face various challenges in web authentication. We designed UniPass, an accessible password manager for visually impaired users based on a smart device. To evaluate UniPass, we tested and compared UniPass with two commercial password managers: LastPass, a popular password manager and StrongPass, a smart device-based password manager. Our study results of ten users, six blind and four with low vision, suggest that password managers are a promising authentication approach for visually impaired users. Participants using UniPass had the highest task completion rate and took the shortest time to complete an authentication related task. Furthermore, the majority (seven out of ten) of our participants preferred UniPass over LastPass and StrongPass.