[blindlaw] Is there an agreement?

[James Pepper]

I have the forms ready in English so that all you need to fill them out is
a PC or  a Mac, it uses the speech engines built into Windows XP onwards to
read and fill out the forms.  Works on a Mac too with Voiceover.  I am
working on the Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi and Vietnamese forms right
now for the Section 203  language districts which would have to use free
screen readers for the languages.  The US forms are not accessible to these
languages.

The Voter form for people who speak Spanish, if you can see, it requires
you to answer in English which is against Executive Order 12166 and the
Voting Rights Act. The form requires the blind to draw a map on the back of
the form, where you are to locate a drawing of an intersection of two
streets, forming a cross.  You label each street and then draw a big X on
the form to indicate your home relative to this intersection and you label
that and then draw in dots to represent buildings in the area and label
them and make sure they are in relation to the other items.  This is a
Literacy Test, a violation of the Voting Rights Act.

The Hopi Indians cannot draw this map so they are denied the right to vote.
 They live out on the range, in open land and the nearest road is a dirt
road if it exists at all, so the state denies them the right to vote
because they did not fill out the form.  God help you if the nearest
intersection is a T.

When I contacted the House Administration Committee that has oversight over
the Elections Assistance Commission, the ones who made the form, they said
that if you speak English with a Spanish Accent, then you are speaking
Spanish.

Four years ago I made the forms accessible, where you could use free screen
readers to fill out the forms and you have access to all of the content,
all of it. and you could fill it out and mail it in just like anyone else.
 This was before I found out about NVDA and JAWS was not automated yet.
 Jim Dickson, the Vice President of the American Association of People with
disabilities presented my forms to the Elections Assistance Commission E A
C and I had presented the forms in August of 2008 and I received an email
from them where they said their web design company was in charge of making
the forms accessible to the blind.  The agency was given that task in the
Help America Vote Act of 2002.

20 days later they came out with their form which they claimed was Section
508 compliant but most of the form was not accessible.  It is a mess.
 Still is.  A few days later the web designer called me up to find out what
was wrong with it as I had complained, she told me that she had it tested
by the Access Board, so I contacted the Access Board, to the man she
referred me to, and he said he never heard from her.  I have the email, I
have the paper trail on all of this.  A few days later Jim Dickson
presented my forms to them.  He said he was optimistic that they might get
around to looking at them, but held out not much hope that they would be
accessible by the election.

About a year later, the Director of the EAC wrote a letter to Congress
where he said that they made the form and tested it with blind people using
JAWS and that it is accessible because they are an agency of accessibility.
 He mentioned that Jim Dickson is on his staff.  So my question is, why
didn't he listen to him and why would Jim Dickson present my forms to the
EAC to make them accessible if they made the form accessible?  So my
opinion of the Director is that either he lied to Congress or he made these
forms purposely inaccessible to attack the blind.

Oh and I fixed the problem in JAWS in forms mode when you move to a second
page of a form, you do not default back to the beginning of the document.
 The Jernigan Institute of the NFB was interested in that one!  The US
Voter Regsitration form does not compensate for this problem so how can
they say they tested it in JAWS?

Depending on which screen reader you use the Voter Registration form for
the State of Oklahoma, this is the state form, its default settings is to
register you as a Democrat. I have found a lot of this type of thing going
on in this election.  The US form is laid out so you can easily change the
answer for "Are you a US Citizen" to "no"  I was wondering how many people
were denied the right to vote because of that error in the design of the
form.

The State of Arkansas insisted on you filling out the form and they said
they never had any complaints in the past and that the blind can register
to vote when they get their drivers licenses.  The State of Washington
responded by saying that they were not required under the law to make voter
registration forms accessible to the blind.
.
I made videos on YouTube to try to explain what is happening on these forms
to people who have no idea what the challenges are to the blind and
visually impaired.  My experience with the Press is that they are afraid of
this issue.

All of the states have Voter ID, it is written into the forms from several
years ago.  It is federal law.  So I do not see why they made a big fuss
over this. If it is OK in California why is it not OK in Texas?

I have very little faith in Government officials and oh yes I contacted the
Justice Department, Civil rights division and they thought this was fine,
no problem.

James Pepper