Shoulder Surfing

A form of visual eavesdropping where an attacker observes a person entering sensitive information such as passwords, PINs, or personal data by looking over their shoulder or from a nearby vantage point. Shoulder surfing is a particularly significant security concern for people with visual impairments, as the accessibility features they rely on — screen readers that announce characters aloud and screen magnifiers that enlarge text — make their credentials more vulnerable to observation. Research has found that more than two-thirds of people with vision impairments worry about entering passwords in public for this reason, driving interest in alternative authentication methods that do not rely on visual input.