I am in a situation where I need to use a laptop that contains SafeBoot by McAfee. SafeBoot is a whole disk encryption program and encrypts and decrypts your data on-the-fly. All this is very well when it comes to security but there is a significant problem when it comes to the accessibility of the solution. The problem is that you are prompted for a userid and password as soon as the computer boots. At this point, there is no screen reader running nor can any be run as far as I know. The only solution that I have is to use optical character recognition. I have been able to do this successfully using the KNFB reader. I have not had a chance to try the OCR applications on the iPhone or on the android operating system. I suspect they will work just as well.

You may say that I could probably memorised fixed key sequences and enter my password and username. This is true however, the login ID I currently have has a feature where the password is changed almost every second time I log in. This is some kind of random security feature that has been introduced. As of this writing, I am not in a position to get any of this altered and, working in the information security field, I do not want to get it altered either. Therefore, OCR is the only way to go.

One of the key challenges with using optical character recognition especially on a mobile phone is aligning the phone camera with the screen such that you will capture the maximum amount of text. On a laptop, it is not as hard as it may seem. You need to align your phone with the front end of the laptop that is the edge with the touchpad on it. That gives you a sufficient distance for a reasonably accurate screen capture.

If you enter your credentials successfully, and capture another screenshot and run the OCR, at least with the cane FP reader, you will be told that too much glare has been detected and you’ll get no text. This may be time to give yourself a virtual pat on the back since it means that you have been authorised and can continue with the next stage of getting into your laptop.