[IL-Talk] Ballot accessiblity

[Lewis Wood]

              Below is my review of the online ballot process that I emailed
to Saint Clair County. I have been working closely with Laura the election
supervisor for St. Clair. She has been bending over backwards and benen
contacting me and keeping me in the loop.  I promised her a review, and I
think it is important for all of us to do this review process as well.  So
please get involved and do an online ballot.  I have the online ballot
application that I filled out to get this online ballot.  You can fill it
out and send it to your county election supervisor.  Be sure to call them
first and ask for email and let you know if it is acceptable.  

 

Here is my ballot review:

 

I submitted the ballot and downloaded it.  When I receive the envelope I
will print it out.

 

Filling out the ballot was effortless.  Reviewing the download with a screen
reader was next to impossible.  

Adobe Acrobat locked up.  Kept recognizing I had a screen reader, but for
some reason could not read the ballot properly.

Tried printing, since I could not review it I decided to print out all pages
and review it with my mobile phones ocs capabilities. This of course was a
pipe dream.

 

Blind people do not always have a whole lot of paper around.  Apparently I
ran on Page 5, so my ballot is still not printed.

 

I then tried to review it with chrome, unsuccessful.

Tried with Firefox, was more successful. Seemed to be missing some
items/questions.  This could be an accessible ballot pdf problem issue. 

I performed ocr to Ms Word, but it will reformat the ballot.  So I can only
use that to ensure all is valid in the document. It was all there.

 

Now in the next few days Amazon will deliver me more printer paper and I
will try printing again.

 

I hate that I had to end my session prior to download verification.  They
need to encode these ballots in a more screen reader compatibility format.
See PDFs have a format that is more friendly to screen readers.  Also would
be better is there were 2 downloads:

Thus keeping the ballot by itself.  This would increase the speed and
efficiency of our OCR software.  Having to OCR so many pages at one time in
a strange format just locks up things.

 

1 or 2 page ballot would be easier and less chance of lockup.

 

For tech staff at ballot.

I have a Lenovo top of the line as of 2021. T1000 graphics adapter with 4gb
memory.  My computer has 32gb of ram/memory. I have 16 virtual cpus. Yet OCR
locked it up, except in firefox. Or converting it to ms Word.

 

I hope my feedback can make this process better.  

PS - I was a beta tester 2 years ago, but you did not have the pdfs ready
yet.

 

By separating ballot from instructions the instructions can be a more free
format and screen reader friendly.

 

Lewis Wood

lewislwood at gmail.com <mailto:lewislwood at gmail.com>