Ballot Cards - Inclusivity in Politics

For the visually impaired and the blind, secretly voting for their selected party was not secret, and therefore some, preferred not to vote. There were often fears that if they were being assisted by someone with opposing views, they could never be certain that they were voting for the correct party.

The Home Office approached Goodwin Product Design to develop a voing methodology that would include visually impaired people. Large type could not be used, as the text size on Uk ballot paper is prescribed by law. Therefore Goodwin produced a very simple device called a selector - a transparent plastic template with a series of windows marked by braile numbers, embosed numerals, black nummbers on a white background and raised finger tabs - which would aid both blind and partially sighted people. the template could be laid over a normal balloting slip and taken off after the mark had been made. He tested each on a focus group made up of a selection of people with a variey of different eye conditions. "You obviously have some prior knowledge of teh concept, or a visual picture, but a key issue is that total blindness is not that common. People with visual impairments have a range of vision problems such as tunnel vision, and these are difficult to simulate." (2004), David Goodwin realised that the products had to be tested on real people rather than just imagining what the person can see and gather. This kind of design allows a company to learn things that it wasn't aware of before.

See the Pakflatt Selector at: http://www.pakflatt.com/html/selector.htm