CAPS LOCK may lock your account

You know your day is not going well when you are prevented from logging into a website that you visit everyday because you typed the wrong password. Panic can strike when you realize that you have just one more chance before you Internet banking account or some equally important website account that holds your critical personal details can get locked. You re-check your password by looking up whatever secret place where you write down your passwords as you curse the world of identity theft we live in. And then you retry again.....

Even if you are not faint-of-heart, it can be disturbing to be told by a stupid web page that your account has been disabled. As you ponder on various conspiracy theories, it will hardly be obvious that your account has got locked because the caps lock key was on. This chain of events is possible when your login id is a number or pre-filled and you get no clue that the caps lock key is switched on.

However this scenario is often overlooked by developers & can cause much aggravation for end-users. Providing hints through tool-tips or warning labels in the login screen (like Windows XP & Vista do) may mean a little more code for the developer to write but a lot less hassle for the user. I understood this after I fell victim to the CAPS LOCK mayhem.

There is ready-made code for web developers to fix this scenario.