[samsa]

I used to work as a librarian and ran into the issues the author writes about. Less than she did - but it being a community that skewed older I have plenty of experience shepparding older and/or low income individuals through basic online tasks such as applying for unemployment etc. If you have never done this kind of work then it is very easy to take for granted how low the baseline technology competency of certain folks is. Telling someone they will need a working phone number, a password, and recovery codes to access their email when "it used to just work" will simply not fly for them.

This side steps the issue that often these are scenarios where the patron is already locked out of their account and coming into a library as a last resort - so lecturing them on backup codes will be of no avail.

[Mezzie]

To give a sense of the level of tech literacy samsa is talking about, I've had to teach multiple people how to use a mouse and keyboard + had to explain to dozens of people that the icon called 'Internet' on the library computer will let them go to Facebook just like the 'Internet Explorer' icon at home or the 'Facebook' app will.

[0x53]

Obviously, it would be better if Google would do something, but they won’t. A temporary solution could be something like a sign that encourages people to print out backup codes and the librarian could help them with it. Maybe the librarians could even store them in a folder and retrieve with ID. Not saying these are good solutions, but they could maybe help a bit.