People who use your websites have a wide range of needs. When we think about making websites accessible, we all typically focus on making them work for people who use assistive technology. But when we design websites to be flexible and accessible, people with low literacy or limited English skills, aging eyes, or a temporary injury can all use websites more easily.
One major way to make registering to vote accessible to people with disabilities is to make it possible to register online, on a website or in an app.
Most of us spend most of our time when we think about accessibility thinking about it in the polling place. But what about the parts of elections that happen before and after the polling place? To voters, it’s all part of the same experience.
So, as this is National Voter Registration Day, let’s look at making voter registration accessible to people with disabilities.
Before we get too far, let’s talk about what we mean by “disability.” At the Center for Civic Design, we aim to design for voters and poll workers with the widest possible range of attitudes, aptitudes, and abilities. That means including people with low literacy and mild cognitive issues, people with low English proficiency, and people with mobility and dexterity challenges, low vision, and blindness. And combinations of those abilities. According to the U.S. Census, 1 in 5 people who are eligible to vote have a disability.
So, how do you make sure that the widest range of people can register to vote? The best place to start is with online voter registration forms that use best practices in web accessibility (and 37 states plus the District of Columbia now have online voter registration).
According to the ACLU’s excellent 2015 report about accessible online voter registration (there’s a link in the Resources list at the bottom of this newsletter), an accessible website is one that all users can access its information, navigate with ease, and interact as needed. The site would:
Making voter registration easy to use for as many people as possible means both design that you can see, and stuff under the covers that helps people who use assistive technology.
Your accessibility advisory committee can help you test out your site to make sure it does actually work for people with the widest range of ability.
This was originally published in our Civic Designing newsletter. Subscribe on Mailchimp to get election design tips delivered to your mailbox.