[blindlaw] Blind Attorneys

[James Pepper]

Last year I made the National Voter Registration form to be accessible to
the blind.  It was tested by the American Foundation for the Blind, the NFB
and Jim Dickson, the Vice President of the American Association of People
with Disabilities presented it to the EAC, the Elections Assistance
Commission which is in charge of elections.  They decided that their
webmaster could do the job and ignored the advice of these organizations.
The Voting Rights Division of the ACLU was monitoring this work as they
thought it was a violation of the Voting Rights Act.

The law for the Voting Rights Act is particularly effective in this case
becasue the consequences of denying the blind to register to vote is the
removal of the sovereignty of the states.  The 14th Amendment Section 2 is
invoked which strips a state of its representation in Congress when they
deny a group of people the right to vote.  Everyone who went through the
Civil Rights movement knows about Literacy tests and poll taxes and the
effect it has on oppressing the people.

the EAC still has a form that can only be partially filled out with JAWS 10
or 11.  They had that form as of September 15, 2008, before that they had an
image of a form.  Their current form violates Section 508 law, it has text
in their images and they have other problems.

But it was not only the EAC that we sent this form, we sent it to all the
states.

Washington responded by stating that they were not required to make the
voter registration form to be accessible to the blind.

So if you want a civil rights case, consider voter registration because the
EAC made voting on election day accessible but if the blind and disabled
actually showed up to vote it would be very disruptive.  The EAC is made up
of the voting officials of every state.  They are very proud that they have
increased the number of disabled people to vote to 4 million more than in
the year 2000 but of course that was the 2008 election which had a record
turn out.  But the number of the blind and disabled are around 80 million in
the US, so they are proud of a 5% increase?  The CDC is currently tracking
33.5 million americans over the age of 40 with the 6 most common eye
diseases that lead to blindness.  Cataracts are 17 million of them.  So we
must demand that the census track the blind and disabled because right now
the figures the government uses is a census study that says there are 1
million sensory disabled people in the US.  So I would tend to beleive the
cases reported by doctors over the census.

I can make interactive content accessible to teh blind using free screen
readers.  All of the content is accessible because I am driven to fix this
problem.  In High School and College I had tunnel vision.  I went to class
with a giant tape recorder that I had to carry on my back.  then I got most
of my sight back and so I looked at software and figured out what was going
wrong and I fixed it.  There is no reason why tests should be
inaccessible.  It is amazing to me.

So if you want a civil rights case with everyone in place to do the job,
here it is!  The problem here is that the civil rights lawyers do not have
the experience of the blind to teach them what is going wrong.  Together we
can force the states to be accessible and if they don't do it, they loose
their representation in Congress under the 14th amendment section 2, the
same law used in Reconstruction.

Sincerely,

James G. Pepper