Transcript for Webinar
Accessible Voter Education

by DO Network & AAPD

Date: September 21, 2018, 12:00 p.m. PT

Presented by: Ted Jackson, DO Network & Zach Baldwin, AAPD

Speakers:

Sarah Blahovec, Disability Vote Organizer, National Council on Independent Living.

Sue Hetrick, Executive Director, Center for Disability Empowerment in Ohio,

Terrica Jennings, Attorney Advisor and ADA Coordinator, DC Board of Elections.

CART Service Provide By: Total Recall Captioning, Inc. Communication Access Real-time Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility, and may not be totally verbatim record of the proceedings.

>> TED JACKSON: Thank you all for joining us today. My name is Ted Jackson with the Disability Organizing Network or what we more fondly call in California, the DO Network. We’re a network of community organizers in the disability community across the state of California which is independent living centers as well as volunteers and we'd like to say that we organize for accessible communities for wherever people with disabilities live, work, learn, shop, play, and boat.

The DO Network is a program of California Foundation for Independent Living Centers and that is the membership organization opened up to all the independent living centers across the state of California, you can check us out at www.disabilityorganizing.net or www.CFILC.org.

We welcome you to today's webinar: “Accessible Voter Education” and I'm excited for it because we're going to hear from some wonderful professionals about how candidates and campaigns can make their campaigns more accessible to how voter education [ Indiscernible ].

And with that, I’m going to hand things off to Zach Baldwin from the American Association for People with Disabilities.

>> ZACH BALDWIN: Great, thanks so much, Ted. My name is Zach, I'm the Director of Outreach with the American Association of People with Disabilities and the Manager of our National REV UP Campaign. The REV UP campaign was launched in early 2016 and it's a nonpartisan initiative that coordinates with national, state and local disability organizations to increase the political participation of people with disabilities while also engaging candidates and the media. Our focus is on voter registration, education, access, and engagement and REV UP stands for Register! Educate! Vote! Use your Power! We can go to the next slide.

Here on this screen are some of the tool kits and guides that we released for 2018. You can find all of these available for free at AAPD.com/REVUP.

This webinar is the second in a series addressing various access barriers to the voting process. Our first webinar last month focused on voter registration and we'll have a recording of that available soon. And our webinar next month on October 18th will focus on access barriers to actually casting a vote in whatever form that takes. But today we are focusing on access barriers to election information coming from campaigns, civic organizations, and election departments.

We have a great line up of guest presenters including Sarah Blahovec, the Disability Vote Organizer with the National Council on Independent Living.

Sue Hetrick, Executive Director of the Center for Disability Empowerment in Ohio, and Terrica Jennings, Attorney Advisor and ADA Coordinator with DC Board of Elections. We'll have some time for question and answer with all the speakers at the end of the webinar.

And now, I'd like to turn it over to our first presenter, Sarah Blahovec. Please go ahead.

>> SARAH BLAHOVEC: Hi, everybody, as Zach said, I am the Disability Vote Organizer for the National Council on Independent Living. And today, I would like to talk about making your voter information: particularly web information, print information, and I'll get a little bit in to events although I know another one of our wonderful presenters is going to be talking about event accessibility. All of this information comes from a guide that NCIL has produced. A free guide that’s available on our website at NCIL.org/campaignguide. This guide is called “Including People with Disabilities in your Political Campaign, A Guide for Campaign Staff”.

And so, this guide just to preface is, a comprehensive look at including people with a number of different disabilities in your voting materials and in your volunteer process. And also, how to interact with or begin to interact with the disability community at whatever level of office you're running or organization you're running to find out what the local disability community in your area cares about, what their issues are, how to, you know, get them on your side.

So, this guide although it's created with campaign staff in mind, we really did it with, it's been useful for campaigns and organizations alike. So a lot of this information can be adapted to settings outside the campaign world.

And on this slide, I just have a picture of the front page of that guide. So, on the next slide, yeah, we can keep going. Thank you. Just to preface with a little bit of information about accessibility, and I'm sure for some of you this is really, you know, something that you're familiar with. Accessibility is not a one size fits all, one time only thing. And that's something that campaigns really need to understand. Because you can't just go in and think about beforehand “oh, what do we need to do to make it accessible?” and then just forget about it through your campaign. It really needs to be something that you integrate into your campaign or your organization like you think about everything else. So whenever you're planning something or putting something new out there or figuring out how to interact with your community, you really need to integrate accessibility as a concept and as a priority. And this is not just for the benefit of voters with disabilities.

Which, we are, one in six voters in the United States. So that's a pretty big group. This is also about doing something that's good for your campaign. Because if you're not accessible to voters with disabilities, you're not going to gain their support. Because they can't find out about you, they can't be a part of your campaign. So it's really a twoway street of supporting them by giving them the information that they need and making sure that they are able to be included and access that information and in return, you know, they'll be able to learn about your campaign and figure out if it's something that they want to support. Next slide, please.

So, starting with printed materials, obviously in campaigns, direct mail is, and campaign literature are a big part of the campaign process. And so, whenever it comes to printed materials, there's a few things that you can do to make sure that they're accessible. All of these things, I do want to add a caveat, they're really dependent on what your campaign's budget is. And the size of your campaign. Some of these things may not be, you know, necessary or appropriate based on running a local campaign or they might be. So it's really something that you have to figure out within the context of your specific campaign or organization.

So, one of the easiest things you can do, whenever you have campaign materials is to make sure that you're making largeprint copies of those materials to have available on request. And some of these, I do want to say, they're not just principles of accessibility, they're principles of universal design. While they do benefit and they were created with people with disabilities in mind, they are something that benefits everybody. So for example, sticking to a simple design that's free of clutter with, you know, large text that's large enough to be readable, that's something you'll read in every guide or learn about in every resource that you read about creating printed materials is making sure that you have a really clean, clear design. And that's something that is beneficial for not only all of your voters, but, you know, voters with cognitive disabilities or visionrelated disabilities.

Make sure that you have good color contrast between the text and the background. So, you don't want to have, you know, really close colors on that because some people with vision disabilities are going to have some challenges in being able to make that out. You want to use plain language, which, if you're not familiar with the concept of plain language. That's making sure that you use simple, jargonfree language. Which again is another universal design concept.

Because if you use language that everybody can understand, that's something that more people are going to be able to relate to. But again, especially helpful to people with cognitive disabilities or intellectual developmental disabilities. And of course, if you upload your materials to your website, make sure that you provide an accessible version of those materials. And there's a few different ways that you can do this. You can make an accessible PDF which you can do in products like Adobe InDesign. You can make a Word or Google document and you can even convert that to PDF after, if that’s what you’d like to do. You can create a plain text document which there's a little bit of, um, information that you need to know about how to organize that for screen reader accessibility. But that is a possibility.

Next slide, please.

So, moving on to web information. Your campaign website obviously is going to be one of the most important pieces that you have in your campaign where you can go rally your supporters and get, give them information on your platform and to get donations. So, this all comes out of the guide, again, in talking about accessible websites. I want, wanted to present the section in a way that is clear for people who don't have a tech background but you are obviously going to need to talk to a web designer or somebody on your team who is tech savvy and can learn how to implement these practices. Preferably do that before the campaign starts, make sure that whenever you're looking for a web developer, or a designer for your website that they understand accessibility. You can ask them about.. The standard of accessibility right now is video web content accessibility guidelines, WCAG2.0. And that's what all of these standards are really created through that.

So here are 10 things to look for in your website or to make sure if you're about to create a website, make sure that the designer knows to do these things or to fix. So, the first issue is called skip navigation.

So if your website probably has a bunch of links and menus and submenus at the top of the page like on your platform or donating, things like that… first, the people who can see the screen easily, that's not a problem. You can go click on that link or, go if you're using a tablet, touch that button. But for people who use screen reader technology which converts the web page from the text and reads it out to you. So if you have a blindness, or if you have blindness or low vision or a mobility disability, you are able to hear the web page.

These often use keyboard navigation to get around the page. So having something called skip navigation allows them to skip through those links quickly so they don't have to listen to all of that. So, having skip navigation is one of the principles that you really need to integrate so that you're not burdening those users with having to go through a lot of text.

The second thing also pertains to screen readers. So, if you have images which I'm sure you do on your website, screen readers obviously can't read an image. They can't tell you what the image is saying. So, what alternative text is, is an HTML code behind essentially that picture that you can put a description, a caption of the image. Use colorful language to describe what the words, what the picture says or important facts about it. If you have any info graphic, you're able to describe that.

So, you need to have alternative texts so that people who are using screen readers can consume the information in your pictures, whether it's, you know, a textheavy info graphic or even just a picture of the candidate making sure that they can understand what's on there is really important.

The third thing is using descriptive links. Whenever you hyperlink something, you don't want to just hyperlink the words "click here". If someone's going through what the screen reader, they will often search by the first letter of the link to find it. So if you're referencing a certain website, link the website's name or link certain resource that you're going to, like, if I was linking the NCIL campaign guide, I'd put the title of the guide to the website so that people know what they're going to.

Ability to increase and decrease font size. It's really helpful for disabled and non-disabled users alike because it makes reading the page easier but is especially helpful for people with low vision. Again, plain language is really important, make sure that your website is jargonfree and in a style that's easy to understand. According to Harvard, there's a few concepts regarding plain language.

So first, put your information in logical order with the important details first. Second, use an active and not a passive voice in your writing. So, say that you're doing something instead of something is being done, for example.

And use familiar language and provide definitions for words that might be unfamiliar to your audience.

The sixth is providing page headings. This is again part of the HTML code. That is a way that you organize content or your web designer will organize content so that people are able to easily skip through and understand where they are on the page. So that is again, it goes back to HTML. Color contrasts, again, like printed materials make sure that you have a good contrast between text and the background of the web page so that people can clearly see the text. Label your foreign fields. So I'm sure that if you're a candidate or you have an email list to sign up for, you have some sort of form where you can put your name and your address and information in there. A lot of times these aren't labeled with what you actually put in the form field. So if you want someone to put their name and they're using a screen reader, they don't have any information on how, on what they should be putting in there. And that means that you might miss a new communication or email list member or even donation.

So make sure that your form fields are labeled so that you're able to help them enter that information and actually get that information.

This one is really simple. But, surprisingly so many candidates and organizations don't do this. Make sure to caption your videos. Closed captioning is essential for people who have hearingrelated, if they are Deaf or hardofhearing, to be able to watch their videos, it could be a campaign advertisement or town hall or just information about your campaign. They're not going to be able to hear it.

And this is again an accessible, a universal design principle. About 80% of people on social media do not listen to videos. They actually just read the close captioning because often times they're in public and they don't want to, you know, sort of make any noise from their phones. So you can do this on YouTube. You can create your own captions, there are many vendors out there who do captioning for you whether it's an individual or service like Rev.com. You can easily type into Google “captioning services” and you'll get a whole host of different vendors that often provide $1 a caption minute or something like that. So make sure that you either are having a campaign staffer to do that or volunteer or you are putting that in to your budget.

And then of course, make sure that your design, again, is simple and clear. So, this will benefit people with cognitive disabilities again or people who have sensory overload issues. But, it's really helpful for everyone.

And then you can go in to the next page. In terms of event accessibility, I'm really going to keep this short because I know another presenter is going to be presenting on this. But again, accessibility really needs to be included through the entire process. So whatever you're considering where you're going to have an event like a forum or a campaign event, whenever you're creating your event materials or registering people, we need to make sure that is accessible. Whatever you're setting up and running through programs, and an event time, there's all considerations that you want to take in to account.

So next page.

So, again, this is, I think we can just go through these slides really quickly, yeah. To the last page here. Yeah, that's good. So, I'm gonna leave this for whoever's presenting on events. But I just want to say in the campaign guide, we actually have a check list in the back that is, that takes this material and makes it in to a check list that involves getting the location, involves setting up and registration, and run through and day of set up. So that you’re able to take this and consider every part of this process and what you might need to consider for different accessibility needs. So things like whether or not it's physically accessible from the outside and inside as you see on this slide, or if you're having, I mean, obviously your room set up as well, making sure that it's free and clear of obstacles and that you might have an ADA section.

Even if you're having food at the event, making sure that your, any allergens are clearly labeled. So again, I just want to say that thank you for giving me the opportunity to present on this and I would really encourage people to go to NCIL.org/campaignguide. And so that they can, you know, get this information in more detail. We have all these points in there along with many free tools and resources that help you evaluate for accessibility and help you to make these fixes.

So my information is on the screen, feel free to contact me at my email address or my phone number and also on the NCIL.org/votingrights website where we have links to all this information and links to important information for the 2018 election. So thank you very much.

>> ZACH BALDWIN: Great, thanks so much, Sarah. And now our next speaker, Sue, please go ahead.

>> SUE HETRICK: Sure, and I will not have a PowerPoint accompanying my comments here. A little background. We convened a group to start discussing a candidate forum in November of 2018 and some of the comments that I'm going to make aren't pertaining directly to accessibility but just planning for and implementing a forum like this.

I've been involved with the 2008 and 2012 candidate forum for people with disabilities, disability issues featuring the presidential candidates. Work with AAPD closely and NCIL and several other entities on those and those were held in Columbus, Ohio. So we decided this year we wanted to do something addressing statewide, addressing the candidates for Governor and the candidates for U.S. Senate.

The U.S. Senate candidates were both incumbents. We did hold the event on July 26th, obviously on the ADA anniversary. Four of those candidates were invited. We did max out registrations for the room. The capacity was a little over 350, we had 360 registrants. We had to close the registration of the 360 registrants, approximately 225 actually came.

I'm going to talk a little bit about how we addressed it through video. But we did have over 7,000 hits on the captioned video including the live stream that we did and then the views of the archived video.

Before I go any further, unless I forget, the archived video for this forum can be viewed on our CDE website which is www.disabilityempowerment.net or the Center for Disability Empowerment's Facebook page. So you can see how kind of how this all came together.

From the getgo, addressing inclusivity and accessibility, it was important that we put together a planning committee that was cross disability or representing cross disability agencies and organizations to make sure we address the needs of all people with disabilities.

We did want statewideness, the longest distance for someone to travel to Columbus which is in the central area of the state was about three hours. So, the needs of all the populations needed to be considered with regard just to the distance.

So, the planning team consisted of the 12 Centers for Independent Living in Ohio, the Ohio SILC, the Association of Area Agencies on Ageing, our state P&A, the League of Women Voters of Ohio, the University of Cincinnati Center for Excellence in DD which is the UCEDD, and the Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio.

We set the goals for the event as three fold, to inform the disability community about the policy position of candidates for Ohio governor and the U.S. Senate. So that they could make an informed voting decision on Election Day or before if they were voting then. To motivate the disability community to get out the vote; and to elevate the disability community and their policy issues and concerns to candidates or to legislators overall.

Just as a side note, we wound up with 21 sponsors. It cost, expenseswise about $18,300 to put the forum on. We were able to cover all those expenses with a little padding which we'll be using for get Out the Vote activities going forward.

So choosing the date and choosing the venue obviously we had to consider accessibility issues. As I mentioned, some people if they intended to come to Columbus for the event live would be driving maybe three hours. So the time needed to be considered. We know that often times we can't have things starting early in the morning. So we did deliberately start the event at 12:30 and went till 4:30 hopefully avoiding some of the rush hour at the end of the day. We had no real budget or wasn't, weren't sure we could cover a budget for meals. But knowing that people might need to eat, we did provide snacks. We provided chips and pretzels and water and lemonade and some sodas. There was no cost to attendees for the event.

The event venue was on the Ohio State University campus. Obviously we screened in depth for accessibility. I happen to have the ADA Coordinator for Ohio State on my board, so he went over and checked it out and we had a couple other people do a site survey as well.

Just as a side note on venue selection, in addition to the accessibility, a consideration is to make sure that the event site is neutral. Is politically neutral as possible and not affiliated, or identified in some way with some kind of partisan demographic.

We did end up packing the room like I said, we had a few less attendees than we anticipated. We pulled chairs obviously but we were close to compromising accessibility in the room, just by the sheer number of people in there. But it did, it turned out all right, we had no complaints and it was accessible to everyone.

We did select as part of our volunteers, people to be placed strategically in that room to provide assistance to anybody who needed it, including at the snack table for whatever needs people had.

The format of the forum, not pertaining to accessibility particularly, was that it was not a debate, but each candidate appeared on the stage with a moderator individually. I do think that does address accessibility for clarity purposes, I think it can be confusing in a debate ping-ponging back between one candidate and the other. Each candidate received the same questions as the others. They did not receive the questions prior to the event, they just received topic areas.

The video projection was captioned in the room by C.A.R.T. and we had interpreters available too, who rotated. One reason we decided to do the video captioning was that we could do a live webcast, there were a lot of people who couldn't attend the event due to transportation issues or time issues or medical issues. So we did live broadcast it by Facebook because Facebook was the most costeffective and most broadly available to most people. That made sure that those who couldn't attend were able to participate. We knew there were some watch parties at some of the CIL’s across the state as well.

We did have a moderator for the event. We had a keynote speaker who was John Kemp. He’s nationally recognized advocate and activist. Most you probably know him. We knew that John or whoever we selected for a keynoter would be important for people to have additional incentive to be there. To be motivated, he motivated on the engagement of people with disabilities and the community to be more engaged in the political process.

We had an emcee for flow control of the event itself, if there were lulls in the program, she filled in and kind of kept the continuity of everything.

I won't get in to how we did the candidate outreach and candidate questions, unless someone wants to know that at the end and asks specific questions about that. With regard to the event promotion, I think that's been covered extensively already, although I did hear some areas where we could've done better. We worked with a professional designer who has a disability himself, some of you might know Dan Wilkins. He designed the logo, the outreach flyer and the program for us. Most of our outreach was electronic. It helped us to ensure more that the documents were going to be accessible to people.

We also used the PDFs which I wasn't familiar with before Sarah -- in Adobe and InDesign. So that we made sure that everybody had access to those.

So some of the challenges just generally speaking, I think we did a pretty upstanding job of the accessibility piece. But beyond that, so that people could be aware if you're doing a forum, you know that you can please some of the people some of the time. But not all of the people all of the time. So we ended up having a couple surrogates because the Senate was in session and as I said, we had two incumbents. They both sent surrogates, but a lot of people weren't happy with that. People weren’t happy that the Green Party wasn’t included. We had some issues with one of the candidates not preferring the moderator we chose. We had hired a PR firm, a public relations firm to handle media outreach and do some coordinating with the candidates. In the end, that PR firm turned out to be a little more partisan than we would have preferred. There were some issues pertaining to that. But in the end, we got high marks, I believe and were encouraged to do this again. So we will do this again in two years. That's it.

>> ZACH BALDWIN: Excellent. Thank you so much, Sue. And now, Terrica.

>> TERRICA JENNINGS: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Terrica Jennings, with the DC Board of Elections. I am the ADA Coordinator but I’m also the Attorney Advisor for the Board. So I wear a couple of hats. I guess in essence, in a nut shell, I deal with all things having to do with the people with disabilities, reasonable accommodations, senior citizens as well as language access.

You can go to the next slide.

So, I'm, I am going to talk about accessible communication but just for those who aren’t familiar with the Board of Elections, we do place a lot of high value on making sure that our elections are accessible. We of course, place a lot of emphasis in ensuring that we have accessible polling sites. We have a voter access team that goes out. We have a lot of signage available that's accessible to our voters that come out. We offer curb side voting to ensure that voters who unable by reason of age or disability and they can’t access our polling site, they can, you know, vote from outside.

We have a very accessible voting machine that we chose with the assistance of The National Federation of the Blind. And we'll talk about that shortly because that also comes to us in how we communicate with our voters. As I mentioned, we do provide voting assistance for our voters on Election Day.

The Election Day hotline and we also offer several types of language access services for our voters who don't speak English as a first language.

I think Sue spoke earlier about the voter, the forum that she had. I just want to mention that we'll be having our own, voter access forum on October 10th starting at 10:00 A.M. here at the DC Board of Elections if you're in town at that time or if you want to work with an organization locally, you know, please stop by. All right. So, next slide, please.

>> ZACH BALDWIN: Terrica, really quickly, could you just describe the image that's on the slide for folks?

>> TERRICA JENNINGS: Yes, I will. And as Sarah mentioned earlier, all the images in my document, all the pictures, everything has alternative text. So if you have this and you have access to this, you'll be able to also see the descriptions.

So the diagram that he's mentioning is basically just a little chart that shows all the different services that I mentioned just now. Starting with our accessible polling site, curbside voting, accessible voting machines, voter access, voter assistance, Election Day hotline and language access. I'll describe all the other pictures but for those who have access to this electronically, you'll be able to also see the descriptions via alt text. Next slide, please.

Okay. So, it's showing up on your screen a little bit different than we have it over here on our PowerPoint. But I'll read through everything for those of you who are listening and don't have access to this. Here at the Board of Election, because we have to interact with so many individuals and we provide, you know, voting information and education. We do provide our stuff in several formats. But before we even go in to how we present our information, I do want to make sure that you guys are aware that before we can get to disseminate any information, we place them on just etiquette portion. How we actually interact with our voters. We teach all our staff members, our parttime staff members, our ward coordinators who are people who go out to provide information. We do provide them with disability etiquette training, which of course, includes people first language. Because, that’s one of the things that for me is very problematic. When I see candidates as well as just individuals who want to help to increase voter turnout, when they use a language that's not appropriate. So make sure that our staff and our parttime folks, they are aware of people first language, they're not offending anyone when they go out to represent The Board.

As far as materials that we send out, some of this stuff, Sarah did an awesome job covering, so I'm not going in to too much details because she already covered it. But I’ll tell you what we do here at The Board. So, when I present voter education materials at different events or when I send them out with our work coordinators, for example, we send them in different formats. We'll do, for example, braille, large print or electronic. Yesterday for example, I had a voter outreach event, a voter education event I presented to the disability community outreach collaborative here in DC and I made sure I sent over my presentation and all the handouts electronically, you know, a day or two before the event, I sent it a day or two before the event so that all the participants, many of whom were blind would have access to it before the day of the event.

In addition to sending over the material electronically, and all the handouts, et cetera, I also provided the information in braille as well as large print. So they had that. For us we also use technology as a way for us to educate our voters and to communicate with our voters and so our website pretty much houses all of our information. We just had our website redone this year which included all the fancy website stuff that Sarah mentioned. So our website is now accessible. In addition to redoing the website with our local technology body here, we also made sure that we incorporated the folks from the Lighthouse, folks from the National Federation of the Blind, like the local folks and a couple other people who we use as testers, auditors to make sure that our site was accessible. We did that for quite some, several weeks before we actually made our site live to ensure that all their assistive technology and all their assistive devices were able to work and are being in sync with our new website.

We also placed that same level of, or the same need for accessibility on our social media platform. For example we're on Twitter, Facebook, we have an app called Vote4DC, the number 4. Those platforms that we post, pictures or any documents, they're also posted in an accessible format with of course the alt text as we mentioned before. And of course, our voting machine, our express voting machine has everything that you can think of to make one to be able to use it in an accessible way. It has large print, you can contrast the screen, et cetera. But we’ll talk about that more shortly.

In addition to communicate with our voters, we don't have any type of outreach event or even voting day election events without having assistive devices available for the voters. When we present any information, so we have like, magnifying glasses, headphones, assistive listening devices. These things are also available with worker training. We train over 3,000 poll workers for each election season. So we have those on site. We also have the capability of incorporating, for example a sip and puff for folks that use sip and puff devices. They can use that with their voting machines as well. As for our training videos... So we use like a training video for different sections of our poll worker training classes. All those videos have closed caption as Sarah mentioned all the details about that. We do provide closed caption.

We also make sure that we have a lot of visual literacy embedded in our training material and our voter outreach material. Because it helps for folks, for example, that aren't literate. They're able to see pictures and connect it with the information that's being presented to them. So we like to incorporate lots of pictures. Especially in, for example, our training manual. I'm not sure how many of you have ever seen our DC Board of Elections training manual. We use lots of pictures. For example, if you're talking about how you put together door bells, we have step by step instructions but we also have pictures that depicts every single instruction that we have – we have available for our poll workers.

And finally, I don't think we can talk about accessible communication without also mentioning language access services. So we ensure that we have sign language interpreters at all public events. We have sign language interpreters available at various polling sites on Election Day, especially any polling site that is posted at Gallaudet University. That way, our voters are able to receive the information that they want and that they’re able to effectively communicate with our staff.

We also have our materials translated into multiple languages. As well as the public, when you're on our Expressvote machines, you're able to translate the ballot from English to Spanish just by hitting one button. Next slide, please.

So some of this stuff I'll go over really quickly because, again, Sarah covered a lot of this information. I’ll just talked to you guys about how we use it here at The Board. Again we make sure that we're using Microsoft. It’s probably the easiest platform that's out there to ensure that we are providing accessible documents for our website as well as just to disseminate when we have different events.

And so for example, PDF documents as Sarah mentioned, that's an accessible way for you to present information. If you're running a campaign and you want to, you know, reach out to your voters, make sure you're posting your information in an accessible way and post it in PDF format. Otherwise when you just post this stuff to the website, it's going to just look like a big mark. Just no one’s going to be able to read it. It’s not going to be able to communicate what you're trying to say to that person.

Now, while many people, you know, while people can assert their… For example legally blind, of course, you know, most people aren't 100%, you know, not everyone's 100% blind. So we think about that when we do present our information. So we don't just focus on braille because lots of people can't read braille. In fact, when we provide braille for any of our events, we notice that a lot of people don't take the braille information. In fact, most people don't. I'll have one or two people that will ask to use the braille. So we always offer the information electronically.

And alternatively, we also provide our information in large print at all our events. Even on Election Day, our sample ballots are available in large print for our voters. Again, we send out all the electronic documents ahead of time so people have the ability to see them and read them before they get to the event. Or to use them during the event.

Next slide, please. Next slide, please.

>> TED JACKSON: Just, just really quickly, Terrica, can you describe the image on this slide?

>> TERRICA JENNINGS: Oh, I'm sorry. Again, they have alt text for those who will receive them electronically. The pictures on this slide, the first one just depicts braille, someone reading braille. The other one depicts a large print symbol that shows someone reading a document with a magnifying glass. And it just shows that it’s also in large print. I also have a copy, the Office of Disability Rights, their logo is there. The reason why I incorporated them, and I should've mentioned that… If you are a qualified disability rights organization, the Office of Disability Rights is a great resource for you to reach out to. They create documents for you in braille in small quantities. So you can just send your word document to them and they'll print it out to you in braille and you can just pick it up from their office. We do reach out to them.

In addition to that, if you go to some of the local DC libraries, they'll also print documents for you in braille. And I have a picture of a sample ballot here as well.

Okay. On the next slide, I have four pictures and the alt text on the first one is just web accessibility. I'm not going to spend any time on that because I think Sarah did a great job talking about how you should approach web accessibility for your campaign. And then I just have the general logos for Twitter and Facebook and for our vote4DC symbol.

As far as how we communicate with our voters, we try to make sure that we have the same information on all our platforms. So on Facebook, on Twitter, on our voting app we'll disseminate the same information as far as Election Day coming up on November 6th. The deadline for you to submit you voter registration, the deadline for you to submit a request for an absentee ballot… all that stuff is posted. And again, we try to keep it in the same format. So even if we do post pictures and anything, it's in an alt text. We have – we use very simple language, plain language as well to make sure that everyone understands what we're trying to say.

And then I skip over all the stuff having to do with the accessible website because again, Sarah covered that.

We also embed all information that’s on our social media platforms on our actual website. And the reason I wanted them to do that was so that it’s a onestop shop. So if you’re, for example, at home and you're using a screen reader, you're not having to do so many clicks, you're not having to go to several different sites and different platforms to receive our information. It's in one central location. Next slide, please.

On this slide, I have a picture of our ExpressVote, voting system. It's our voting machine that we have here. Again, this is, this machine allows our voters to vote independently and of course, it’s accessible. We picked this machine with the National Federation of the Blind. And this machine allows any individual who is blind to vote independently. So that individual can vote by first of all using the audio. It has great audio features. You're able to increase the volume. You're able to turn it down. You're able to change the tempo to make it faster or slower. You're also able to vote using braille. It does have braille on the actual tablet system and you have braille on the actual machine that you can use. And alternatively, you are able to use the different buttons on the tactile pad. So vote even if you can't read braille. Because each button has an individually shaped, a different shape, I'm sorry.

It's plain, varies in color so you're able to vote that way if you have any visual disability. You can contrast the screen, you can change the colors, what works best for you. You're able to touch the screen if you have any type of dexterity related to disability. You are able to adjust the contrasts as I mentioned as well as the text size. If you need to increase the words on the machine, you can do that as well. Voters are also able to use headphones even if they don't have a visual disability in order for them to get information right to them. So if you're someone who can't read for example, that information can also be read to you from start to finish. You can pause it, you can go back, you can have the information re-read so it's quite accessible.

And again, in addition to having all those features, if you have your own individual or personal assistive device like a sip and puff machine or your own headphones, anything, you're able to incorporate those with your machines by simply plugging it in and there's a plug in for that at the machine.

And finally on our machines, we allow voters to receive information in both Spanish and English. And we are working to have that in several other languages but right now it's just Spanish and English.

Next slide, please. All right. So the next slide is about how we communicate or how we help folks communicate with us and how we're able to help them receive the information from us. On this screen we have a picture of a magnifying glass, an assistive listening device, a set of headphones as well as a sip and puff device.

We provide during our voter outreach events and during our poll worker training events and on Election Day, we always have magnifying glasses at our check-in table as well as our voter assistance table. We find that people use them a lot. Because if you come in and you're not able to see the information because it's small, you have a visual disability, you are able to use those. We also have, well, we don't have sip and puff devices in our office. We do each our staff about how to use those and how to assist our voters with those. Headphones are a big deal to us. When you walk in to a precinct, every single precinct has headphones attached to the machines. So voters are also able to get information that way. You don't have to wait around for someone to come over and read the information to them. I guess it's because not I guess, it's because we want to emphasize independent voting. And just independently being able to receive the information that you want.

Next slide, please.

Okay. So, again, Sarah already covered closed captioning, so I'm not going to spend too much time on this. We have an orientation video that we provide at each one of our submissions here. That video is also captioned because we want to ensure that voters, no matter who you are – if you are deaf or hardofhearing, you're able to receive that information. We also have descriptive words on screen along with our pictures to make sure there's visual literacy. In addition to that, we use a disability etiquette video that was created by the Office of Disability Rights. And of course, that video has closed caption in order for our voters to receive that information.

We use it at our outreach events. We use it at our poll worker training classes and we use it when we train our inhouse staff as well.

Next slide. All right. So one of the ways how we ensure that we are effectively communicating with our voters and presenting voter information – voting education is by ensuring that we have sign language interpreters whenever we have public events. So for example, I'm having our voter access program on October 10th. We've already submitted our stuff to have sign language interpreters available here for us. When I have big events like those, I don't really just wait for someone to request a sign language interpreter, I always just have someone on staff. Because sometimes individuals don't remember to request one ahead of time and I would hate for someone to show up and not have a sign language interpreter available for them.

Also, on Election Day we have several polling sites that are staffed with sign language interpreters and if you're voting in DC and you need some information that you’re unable to receive by virtue of writing down your question or having someone write the answer to you, something more complicated, we’ll have a sign language interpreter sent to your location as well. We also have multilanguage interpreters available. So in DC we have to provide voter education and voter information in Spanish, Mandarin, Amharic, Korean, French, English, I don't think I missed any. Vietnamese. And so we have interpreters that are able to help voters in all those languages available on Election Day. Next slide, please. In addition to that, I should mention that when individuals contact our office for information they are able to get that information in the languages that I just mentioned earlier. And that’s under the DC Language Access Act.

On this slide, I have a picture of a “VOTE HERE” sign that has the words written in Mandarin and Spanish and English. I have a little chart that has “Need help in your own language?” along with our phone number in all the six languages that I just mentioned. A big part of what we do is ensure that… DC is a melting pot. We have folks from all over the world. We place a lot of emphasis on ensuring that we can communicate with everyone in the city. So one of the ways we were able to do that is via language line which is basically a personal interpreters that are available via phone.

Our staff is trained on how to do this. They're able to contact language line. Let the interpreter know what language they're seeking. Get someone on the phone and communicate with our voter if they're here in person or on a threeway line if they're on the phone. On Election Day all our captains are equipped with cell phones and they're able to do the same thing. So it doesn't matter if you don't speak any of the six languages I mentioned. Any language you speak, we're able to contact language line to provide you with whatever education or material that you're, information that you're looking for.

In addition to helping us communicate more effectively, we hire lots of bilingual poll workers. We also have translated signs, translated voting materials. So we have one document for example, that's called “What every voter needs to know”. That document is translated in to multiple languages as well. And for our voter guide, which also provides a lot of information, we have that document available and voters can request that document in whatever language that they speak.

Predominantly the six that I just mentioned. And all are signs are bilingual. If you're for example in a part of the city where we have a predominant amount of folks who speak Amharic like in our big Ethiopian neighborhoods, you'll see Amharic signs mostly. If you’re in another area that has mostly folks that speak Spanish, you’ll see more Spanish signs, et cetera. Actually, that was my last slide.

In general for us, the whole concept of providing voter information in different formats, it covers not just people with disabilities but also folks who don't speak English or people who, I guess, cross both lines. We just want to ensure that everyone has the information. Especially because the elections is fastapproaching. It's going to be on November 6th and early voting actually starts on October 2nd, 22nd, I'm sorry.

If you are or members of your campaign or other members of your disability rights organization needs information in an alternative format, we have an FAQ which is our frequently asked question document on our website which is www.DCBOE.org. It provides information for individuals who have disabilities, senior citizens and those seeking language access services. It pretty much answers any question you can think of, as far as those demographics are concerned. If you want to reach out to us, please do that and we will be happy to share our information electronically or in some other format that's most accessible for the group you're trying to reach. If you have any questions, please let me know.

>> TED JACKSON: All right. So, I'm going to thank all our presenters today, this is really, really wonderful information.

Are there any folks that have questions?

>> SARAH BLAHOVEC: I was wondering if you have your poll worker trainings available publicly or the materials you use for that because it sounds like you have some really good best practices for disability inclusion. And I think that could potentially be a model for many other Board of Elections offices or, you know, election directors on disability inclusion.

>> TERRICA JENNINGS: Yes. I have, well, I don't post it online because sometimes I'll make little edits and I'll have to reprint for my staff or send it out electronically. But yes. I do have a lot that I typically adjust throughout the election cycle [ Indiscernible ] and have available if someone wants, if you or someone else wants to see a copy of that I'm happy to share it. I have shared it with different organizations who use it to help individuals overseas create their own disability etiquette training program for their workers and for their staff. So yes, I'm happy to share that.

We also have, we also have our inhouse manual available for voters. I have a hard copy available for, not a hard copy, I've made a copy of it electronically for individuals that need it. However we are working on cleaning up the process where everything is online as opposed to just simply giving the information in hard copy when someone asks. Because obviously, that would not be accessible for someone who is blind to give them a hard copy of the document.

But as far as my training portion is concerned, it’s always available electronically or in large print or in alternative colors if someone needs it printed in another format.

>> SARAH BLAHOVEC: Great, thank you.

>> TERRICA JENNINGS: Our poll worker training classes are open to whoever signs up, so people can come in and just observe, which we do have. I've had several people from different disability rights organizations ask to come in to audit our class, to give us feedback, tell us what they like, what we can change, or include, or speak about more. We, our class breaks it down, in our classes we talk about of course, the people first language, just the general disability etiquette portion about how you talk to folks. We break it down by various disabilities. We also spend a lot of time talking about polling place accessibility and so it kind of covers all those major topics and then we have an entire twohour session that's simply about how you post the signs, how you make the routes accessible. And so our stuff is more operational accessibility as well as structural accessibility. How we help everyone get in to our polling sites and vote independently on Election Day.

>> TED JACKSON: Great. This is wonderful information. Are there any other questions?

If not, then I'm going to hand this over to Zach Baldwin from AAPD to close us out. Thank you.

>> ZACH BALDWIN: Great thanks so much, Ted and thank you again to all our presenters and everyone joining us today. And then our next webinar is coming up on October 18th and that one will be focused on access barriers to actually voting, whether that's going in to a polling place, voting absentee and using alternative ballot formats. And thank you again for joining us today.