[blindlaw] Signing Documents as blind attorneys

[James Pepper]

Techie here.  I design documents where the signature is placed at certain
consistent locations on the page and I tell you where it is located by
distance, for instance, a half inch above the bottom edge of the page within
a margin of a half inch on each side of the page, and I do not place any
other content near it so you have room to manuever. But you will not
find designers who are doing this type of thing because they rarely care
about telling you where things are located.

Also they are stuck in the idea that a digital form for the blind must look
exactly the same as a paper form even though the current stock of paper
forms use fonts that are too small to be scanned. Most government forms use
fonts that are tiny and so you cannot use OCR software on them, so where is
the "meeting of the minds" for all of you legal experts?  How do you record
a copy of a document if you cannot scan it and have a copy and why is it
that people think it is your responsibility to determine what is on a page
that is sent to you.  I have noticed that there is a lot of editorial work
done on scans to make them intelligible and that responsibility is placed on
the receiver of a document when it should be the responsibility to
communicate their thoughts from the writer of the document.

Forms designers cannot conceive of the idea of a large print form as a
minimal concern for the blind, let alone using fonts that can be scanned and
used with OCR.  Both are tied together because if you cannot scan the
document, then how do you have a copy you can access?

Digital Signatures in PDF files can have your actual signature as an image
and it binds the page and changes the accessibility of the page so you have
to be careful of how you set those settings and you are limited in the use
to 500 copies of a form due to licensing from Adobe of this technology, so
you don't see this used very often in PDF documents.

Many government agencies require a written signature and do not allow
digital signatures. The Elections Assistance Commission insists on it for
voter registration.

It would solve a lot of problems if a signature field could be signed
electronically so you would not have to know where the signature field was
located on the page, you just sign it when the screen reader finds the
field.

James Pepper