My friend
The Blind Owl asked me to post this on her behalf, as she
is was not yet a Kossack. (
Update: Latest word from her is that she successfully registered her own dKos screen name a few hours ago.)
As a blind voter, I have always been concerned about verifiability. I have never known for sure if the person assisting me was actually carrying out my wishes. In instances where I was able to get assistance from a friend who had a similar schedule, that was not a real problem—although that has not often been the case, since I needed to vote early in order to arrive at work on time.
I have often been forced to rely on poll officials to assist me in the voting process. I am not saying they were all dishonest; many have been very accommodating and have probably been honest, although I’ll never know for certain. Unlike people with other disabilities, who can watch what their assistants are doing, blind people must rely completely on our assistants and have absolutely no way to verify how our ballots have been cast.
Unfortunately, many blind people assume that, with the new “accessible” machines, for the first time, they are casting an independent and private vote. They believe the machine manufacturers who tell them that the machines are foolproof. And they desperately want their voices to be heard in the polling booth, so they go along with the flow, not understanding how easily these machines can be tampered with. Moreover, since they never really knew for certain that their votes were being cast according to their preferences, they have difficulty understanding why we are stressing voter verifiability since they never had it, anyway.
So, in an effort to familiarize my colleagues with the issues, I have decided to be a good girl and do my research homework. Unfortunately, while some websites regarding voting are accessible to me, some are not, and I have not been able to get some of the information I need. Imagine finding a specific article you have been hunting down for days, only to learn that you can’t read it. I’m sure that many of you have faced similar frustrations, dealing with interlibrary loan, etc. The difference is that I might actually have the article up on my screen—but I can’t read it.
I want to do everything I can in order to convince my blind colleagues that the makers of these voting machines may not have their best interests at heart. But in order to do this, I need your help. Since I know we are all pissed about the state of the press, we can all take some actions that will make information more accessible to an important segment of the population.
If you are a website developer or designer, you can design your website with the blind in mind by going to www.webaim.org and learning about accessible web design. There are other websites that also deal with this topic, but www.webaim.org will get you started. If more information is accessible to blind people, they will realize that, while we have never known whether our votes were being cast as we wished, now everyone has the same problem, and we must work together to change it.
— The Blind Owl