Accessible voting information:
If you can’t find it, is it really there?
Sometimes the problem with accessible voting information is that you simply can’t find it.
While more people with disabilities are voting, there is still a stubbornly persistent voting participation gap between people with and without disabilities, according to Doug Kruse and Lisa Shur’s research for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission in 2020.
The team at the Center for Civic Design wondered how hard it was to find information about independent and private voting across the country.
It didn’t take long to find out it is a challenge. When we looked at the official state election sites for all 50 states and Washington DC, we found that even the titles of the pages had a lot of variation. Page titles are especially important for navigation because search engines use them and it’s how people know what the page is about.
- 21 variations on “voters with a disability”
- 16 variations on “accessible voting”
- 3 variations on “assistance”
- 11 states had no dedicated page at all
Some states did a good job of bringing all the information together, but some made the information hard to find. In one state, the only information about accessible voting was a (not very accessible) PDF of a tri-fold brochure.
We wanted to do better. The information we wanted is out there…. somewhere. So we started gathering it.
This year, we launched AccessibleVoting.net. It’s the first national voting information website of its kind, combining basic information about voting options with details about voting rights, details of options for in-person, regular voting by mail, and accessible tools in the 31 states that have these programs so far.
The site design was based on HealthyVoting.org. In the 2020 site, which we made in order to help voters understand what options they had to vote and maintain their health in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, we included a separate section for accessible voting to make this information more visible, but the section had little of the information we really wanted. Finding more details took us to places like the National Conference of State Legislatures (for their excellent 50-state scans of voting laws), the voting system database called The Verifier, sites like VoteRiders with voter ID information, and the voter information websites in each state.
As we thought about what information we wanted to include on AccessibleVoting.net, we considered the principles and personas in Whitney Quesenbery and Sarah Horton’s book on designing accessible experiences, A Web for Everyone, and all the different barriers to voting, from mobility to cognitive disabilities that affect people with disabilities.
We worked on creating a great experience on mobile, because we know that many people with disabilities rely on smartphones and tablets as their only computers.
We limited the amount of text on each page, with an emphasis on plain language and making each section with details on ways to vote quick to read and easy to scan.
And then we launched the website during REVup the Disability Vote week, with support from the Microsoft Accessibility and Democracy Forward teams.
If you know someone who is having problems voting because of a disability, you can send them to https://accessiblevoting.net/
More information about the site and program:
- An article about the project on the Center for Civic Design’s website
- An article on making elections more accessible in Microsoft on the Issues
- A post from Coforma.io on future-proofing AccessibleVoting.net
