The combination of keyboard and online connectivity are being marketed as a method of reducing credit card fraud.  When a button on the card is pushed, the card produces a unique password that can be used once.

Passing over the inherent surveillance possibilities, I’m struck by a couple of accessibility problems with this type of device.

The teensy keyboard looks like it would be fertile ground for typos and frustration for anyone with the dexterity issues posed by garden variety changes that come with age.

More problematically the conceit of the card also relies on an invisible resource: the card holder’s short term memory.  The ability to remember patterned information (such as a phone number) diminishes with dementia and the likelihood that someone with even a mild memory problem will recall a random string of digits is small.  (Password systems in general wildly over-estimate people’s ability to remember random strings: there’s a reason why people hoard passwords on paper.)

A card such as this may indeed become part of a cashless society but it would also be a source of additional (and unneeded) frustration for people with less than obvious limitations.

Links:

• Credit card details and a press release
• Radio show
• Basic information about dementia in Canada