Little do these companies know, literally! They seem to claim that their websites or applications aren’t used by people with disabilities, so they don’t need to pay attention to web accessibility. However, the tracked profile of a user with a disability is identical to anybody else using that browser.

Knowing that 18.7 percent of US citizens are disabled (according to a 2005 report from the United States Census Bureau), they should start right away!

I haven’t found any metrics on the matter but I do believe that many, mostly governmental, instances are making the extra efford – although slowly – in optimizing their websites, (web) applications, … but companies and others still have to follow their example.

(to make a point… this messaage has taken well over half hour to write and involved 32 corrections).

There are various reasons why this is not a good idea.

1) You may think that “over the shoulder” password peeking doesn’t occur anymore, but it’s far more likely to happen now than ever. Be it your girlfriend trying to figure out your Facebook password to see if you’re cheating, or the florist that brought flowers to your office who is really a corporate spy. No this is not a movie script. This stuff does happen.

2) It has worked the way it is for ages. Why change something that works? Most people authenticate many different ways. Browser’s password manager, a password managing app, the leave their account logged in, or are so used to typing their password that muscle memory takes care of the rest. Is it really that hard to type a string of 8 to 13 characters correctly?

3) Users grew up with the idea that masked passwords mean security. You take that away and people will think twice about using your website. Though password masking does not equal security, it’s to late to change the perception of it all.

There’s a point where usability pioneering starts getting in the way. Study the effects of positioning, whitespace, simplicity and complexity in interfaces, call to action importance hierarchies, and the whole plethora of other usability issues; but really, this stuff works well already, and changing it will make you the outcast in the list of sites the user uses. If out of the 10 sites I use 9 mask passwords and 1 doesn’t, I might associate that with not being safe or meaning something completely different to what it would mean otherwise.

To finish up, one of the most important concepts in user experience is consistency, and this doesn’t only apply to the design of your site. It is just as important to maintain a consistency in certain elements the user interacts with throughout the whole web, and one of said components is the password field.

In our software program, when you enter a password, such as for your key, it’s in all dots. But there’s a check box you can select that allows you to “Show keystrokes.” If you know no one is at your back, you can select this to verify you’ve typed the correct password. In our case, it’s a simple usability fix.