Abstract: Methods and devices are provided for reading optical cards. A housing has a slot for slidably receiving an optical card. The optical card has physical tracks with an arrangement of physical pits to define on optically encoded biometric. A light detector is fixed in position relative to the housing. An optical train is also fixed in position relative to the housing and is configured to provide optical paths between the light detector and the optical card as the optical card is slid along the slot. A biometric sensor is provided. A processor is coupled with the light detector and with the biometric sensor. The processor has programming instructions to compare a biometric measured by the biometric sensor with the optically encoded biometric read from the optical card with the light detector.