Making online voter registration accessible to people with disabilities

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.

What do we mean by “disability”?

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.

What makes a website accessible?

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:

  • Allow people with visual disabilities to use screen readers (this is software that reads the page aloud and communicates navigation options)
  • Help people with limited hand or arm mobility use the site using only the keyboard or voice commands (rather than a mouse)
  • Provides people with some intellectual disabilities or who are deaf with written versions of audio content.

How to do it

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.

  • Make the information easy to read. Start with large enough text and good contrast, but make it easy for voters to adjust the appearance to their own preferences.
  • Make headings meaningful. Support the visual presentation with heading styles. The styles should be distinct visually, and should use the correct HTML code. This helps people with low vision and who are blind to find their way through the site as they use assistive technology.
  • Structure the site with proper HTML tags and appropriate meta-data. Create links to skip over banners and menus that are repeated on each page. Or use special coding in HTML to identify the roles for the area of the page, especially the main content.
  • Code the form fields so they are accessible to screen readers. Make sure everyone can use voter registration forms, absentee ballot requests, and “My Voter” features. A few simple coding techniques make forms accessible. Connect each label or prompt to its field.
  • Make sure everything works with a keyboard. People using assistive technology often do not use a mouse. Check your site by using it without a mouse. Try just using the tab key to move from field to field to see what that’s like.

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.

Resources

This was originally published in our Civic Designing newsletter. Subscribe on Mailchimp to get election design tips delivered to your mailbox.