[acdha]

You might want to read past the first paragraph before incorrectly claiming it’s clickbait. The fourth paragraph covers why online verification excludes a lot of people - nearly half of older Americans - and the fifth covers the building closures which remove the option many people use to fill that gap.

One thing in particular to consider is how painful MFA is for many people, especially those with marginal connectivity or disabilities, and how commonly older people are phished or have malware on their generally older, often unpatched devices. If you haven’t supported a population like this, it’s way more of a barrier than you might think.

[billev2k]

MFA is often painful for me, and I've been a dev since we were called "programmers".

[acdha]

Definitely. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen some horrid login flow and cringed to think about what it’s like for people who have visual or cognitive impairments, use a janky old phone they got on one of those lifeline plans, etc. If I’m remembering right, one test with SMS codes with a short expiration (10-15 minutes) had lose to half of older users struggling with delays and the challenge of copy-pasting or remembering only the code within that time limit.

We have really lost our way as a field for some basic user experiences and that really shouldn’t be acceptable for government services or companies people need to deal with like utilities, banks, etc.