Testifying to the PCEA: Accessibility as a driver for innovation
Legislation from the ADA and the Voting Rights Act to HAVA have included requirements for accessible voting. Why then, despite evidence that we intend to make elections accessible, have we failed to meet the goal of an accessible system that is not only available but usable and used?
One answer, as I said in my testimony to the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, is that we need “New ways to think. Not isolated silos of work with security, design, and accessibility working in separate rooms, but collaborative innovation, with everyone at the same table so the resulting ideas are: universal, with a single voting system for everyone. Flexible, allowing for differences in voters, election procedure, state laws. And robust, able to keep up with the pace of change while still supporting elections we can have confidence in.”
Based on both our work at the Center for Civic Design and the Accessible Voting Technology Project, I suggested three
- Adopt best practices from industry. We know a lot about how to make technology accessible. Elections can use this body of knowledge.
- Create better ways to collaborate. Open up the process of innovation to bring in new ideas. As one attendee put it, our workshops were “a chance to get out of the echo chamber” and work together in new ways.
- Design for extremes. Include more people from the beginning, rather than trying to adapt to a broader range of capabilities after a voting system or election process is designed.