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

Cropley, David, Whittington, Paul and Dogan, Huseyin (2025) Issues with Electronic Identity Authentication: A Qualitative Study with Disabled Participants.

Every day, 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 for most people, but what if some people find this step hard, frustrating, or virtually impossible to do? 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 remediating 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 principles to the data. As anticipated, results illustrate that most disabled users find that their capability to Authenticate effectively is reduced due to various accessibility barriers. 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 remedy the root causes of these accessibility complications that hinder our disabled community.