People with aphasia and other communication disabilities experience a multitude of challenges in everyday life, and experience significant challenges related to interacting with textual information. Voting, and learning about political issues, presents many challenges for this population related to comprehension of text, audio, or video content. This paper describes exploring this issue with staff and members at SCALE, an aphasia support center in Baltimore, MD.
Additional Details
The staff at SCALE use a variety of strategies and techniques to support accessible conversation, which might be useful in an election context, for example for interacting with voters at the polling place.
- Present content using multiple formats.
- Extract key content.
- Rephrase for verification.
- Provide easy feedback mechanisms, including writing materials.
SCALE staff and members reported a variety of accessibility challenges when voting:
- Lack of accessible and unbiased voting information.
- Lack of physical access.
- Difficulty understanding instructions.
- Concerns about making incorrect choices.
- Complex ballot initiatives.
- Difficulty processing numbers.
- Effect of phrasing on comprehension.
- Differences between sample and real ballots.
- Misunderstandings when working with an aide.
The researchers suggest the following guidelines for making voting information more accessible.
- Present simple text, in small chunks. When possible, provide alternative phrasings as ancillary content.
- Provide redundant multimedia content. Present supplementary multimedia information whenever possible; combine text with pictures, captioned videos, and audio.
- Provide audio controllable feedback. Allow the user to control the speed of the audio feedback, and make it easy to skip back and repeat content.
- Provide alternatives to numerical content. Numbers, whether presented as text or numerals, can be difficult for people with aphasia to understand. When possible, provide alternative representations to numerical content, such as charts and graphs.
- Make instructions simple and omnipresent. People with aphasia may benefit from direct manipulation-based interactions.
- Request user feedback via simple inputs.
- Verify the user’s understanding. Verify the user’s understanding through repeated polls and verification steps. Use alternative phrasings of the same question.