My comment is in response to the discussion about this:

"Of course, my preferred solution to this problem is to allow the user to toggle the password field, so that they can view the unobscured text if they wish"

I am assuming that if the password field is being toggled, that it is not actually a password field but rather a regular text field with some javascript stuff messing around to hide the text. That would probably function just like a username field. I'm not really a web developer though, so it is possible my analysis isn't correct.