In today’s paper, while I was getting irritable with the amount of coverage the president’s visit to Greality is getting, i read something that made me stop and say, “the hell?”
this year will be the very first year that people who are blind can vote without needing a sighted friend to help them.
do what?
I can get books on tape, most computers can EASILY be adapted to fit the needs of the blind (large screen for vision loss, scanning equipment that reads pages out loud, ebook readers that read information orally, programs like dragon that require speaking and not typing, to give a few), but we have never been able to adapt voting equipment to give blind people the option to vote easily as they should be able to?
and its usually not a friend or neighbor who had to help either, it was a poll worker. there is a nice article here about trust issues and how this will affect things.
Now, the candidates and the issues are on audio tape, with some kind of push button select system. it also has a way of skipping all the additional info on an issue, much like most voters skip the insanely long legalese discriptions in writing.
this really shouldnt surprise me, i guess.
people with disabilities are about 20 percent less likely to vote than those without disabilities because of various barriers at the polling place. Had those barriers been removed, there might have been as many as 4.6 million additional voters in 1998.
so i just spent half an hour discussing the importance of voting with my students. all of whom, interestingly enough, are disabled. i think i scared them a little.
what are the laws concerning voters with disabilities? can they be prevented from voting if they dont have a high enough IQ? or if they cant talk?
i have one student who, to look at her, you would think she would be severely cognatively impacted by her disabilities. Using her DynaVox, she can write her own sentences, and using the scanning option and a switch, can write with her vox, and her knee.
one of my students insisted she could not vote, because she was too severely disabled.
do you know the laws concerning disabilities in your community? I encourage you to check them out. Some of them are pretty interesting.