Early results are in on the new accessible voting machines that allow the
blind to vote independently for the first time.  Below is Shirley's
experience.  Thanks for the report and I hope such access will be
available where I live someday.

kelly





Date: Tue, 07 Nov 2000 23:22:20 -1200
From: Shirley Koda <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]

Hi Kelly,

I used one of the voting machines that was made accessible for blind
people.  It was a great experience!  The machine was very easy to use and
the program with speech talked me through every step of the way.  The one
very small drawback is that it does take more time because the speech is
fairly slow I guess so everyone can comprehend it.  I think that there
should be a way to speed the voice up so that things can go a little faster.

I was the first person that I knew to use the machine.  I told three other
people about the process and two of them have voted the same way.  They
both loved it.  The third person said that they wanted to do it but I
haven't heard from him yet so I don't know if he did or not.
Unfortunately, there haven't been very many people using the machines.  I
voted very early, but I was only the third person to use the machine at my
location.

If you have any  questions about the voting machines, I can try and answer
them if you'd like.

Shirley


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html