Project factsheet
Universal Design of ICT-Based Solutions for Registration and Authentication
- Period
- July 2008 - December 2008
- Web site
- N/A
- NR contact
- Kristin Skeide Fuglerud (project manager)
- Funding
- The IT funk program ― The Research Council of Norway with contributions from the project partners
- Norwegian partners
-
- Norwegian Computing Center (Norsk Regnesentral)
- Karde as
- TellU as
- Encap as
- Brønnøysundregistrene
- Storebrand
- Directorate for administration and ICT
- The Norwegian Association of the Blind and Partially Sighted ― NABP
- The Norwegian Dyslexia Association
- Project description
-
In order to use many private and public services citizens are increasingly
dependent on their ability to use different information and communications
technologies. Examples include ATMs, online banking, ticket machines, and writing
and delivering the tax form. These systems often require that users authenticate themselves,
mandating the user to go through a registration process in order to
use the service. This process typically includes codes that must
be remembered and (visual) instructions from the system that must be carefully
followed. Many of these security features are difficult to use for an average citizen and
may be impossible to use for people with disabilities.
Technical and logically secure solutions have been created at the expense of a user's need for
simple and accessible solutions. Our
experience in past e-inclusion and accessibility projects indicates that there is a
great need for easy-to-use, accessible and universally-designed authentication
mechanisms.
The project goal is to identify research challenges and needs related to universal design, accessibility, and security and privacy in present-day solutions for authentication and registration. This will lay the basis for development of a proposal for an international project. The project will look into the usability, accessibility, and security/privacy issues in each step of several types of registration and authentication methods for identification of a person, such as logging on to web services, use of capthca codes, PIN-code in ATMs and more.
The main activities are:- Characterize different registration and authentication mechanisms. Each such mechanism will be analyzed with regard to the challenges it may pose to different user groups, such as elderly, people with dexterity problems and visually, hearing or cognitively impaired. In addition, each mechanism will be evaluated and graded with respect to security and privacy.
- Examine the participant enterprises authentication solutions by user testing with dyslectic and visually impaired users.
- Establish a consortium with international partners to develop a proposal for a project within universal design of authentication and registration solutions as the main goal.