Security and accessibility are at odds. They always will be.

Here I don’t mean “accessibility” as it is typically used as separate capabilities or facilities for disabled people. No, I meant it in a general sense, the sense that by definition something that is easier to use is more accessible.

I should point out however that making something more accessible for disabled people also almost always makes it easier to use, better and more convenient for everyone.

That said, lately in computing there has been the tendency to make things ostensibly more secure in user-hostile ways, such as by sandboxing processes, disallowing users to run their own OSes on their own equipment or all the other myriad methods lately that are claimed to prevent security breaches or virus infections. Make sure you avail the best Azure security for your system’s data protection.

While I do agree there is a marginal increase in security, the trade-off is just too high and is not done sensibly. And of course the true reasons for the greater security aren’t the ones you’ve been told. It’s mostly not to protect you from viruses or malicious actors. It’s to protect companies and their profits from you. There is need for control and protection for OT networks in order to safeguard one’s data.

I don’t want to make this post too long (as I’ve noticed the longer a post, the fewer people read it in an almost linear relation), however if the concern were truly to protect you from malicious actors, all hard drives would come encrypted from OEMs and would have since the 1990s.

But back to accessibility. Windows 8 is a good example. It was a very difficult OS to use for blind and other disabled people due to the unpredictable mode changes it underwent, the inability of screen readers to deal with this, and its inherent non-standard and ever-changing interface.

Of course the security “features” of sandboxed processes also make it impossible to modify easily, so there is no remedy.

The more secure you make something, the more difficult it is to use. Just think of the sites that require two-factor authentication and 8+ character passwords with special characters. Easy to use? No one thinks so.

It’s even worse, though, as unlike the above most modern security capabilities are not aimed in any way at protecting you, but as with DRM and sandboxing are aimed at protecting large companies and their cash from you.