While disabled people and those who are "shut-in" (by illness or age) have different needs, educational programmes will, in both cases, only succeed if there have been adequate arrangements made for them.
Overcoming Discrimination
A society's treatment of the vulnerable and disabled provides a good judge of its commitment to democracy and human rights. But the manner in which voter education will be conducted will depend heavily on the arrangements that a country is willing to make to encourage such people to participate in the society. There are those who work with the disabled who consider the primary educational task to be not amongst this segment of the society but amongst the able-bodied.
Awareness of ways in which society discriminates against the disabled through its architectural, infrastructural, and legal arrangements has to be the first priority of any education programme. And election arrangements have to be in place that enable and encourage participation before there can be any confidence that a voter education programme for the disabled should be undertaken.
Once this confidence is there, strategies have to be developed that deal with different categories of disability. In some cases, it may be enough to communicate in standard voter education programmes that are accessible to the disabled that the elections themselves will be accessible.
All other information may not change nor may the educational approach.
Reaching Out
In other cases, educators will have to reach out to those who are shut in by identifying the institutions where they are under care and preparing materials and contact with such institutions. There are societies that have been structured in such a way that the shut-in and disabled are invisible. In such societies, educators must make the invisible apparent, at least to the planners and implementers of the voter education programme. This can be done by making contact with organisations of care-givers, relatives, and the disabled themselves. It can also be done in a dramatic way, and a way that ensures that the programme takes account of special needs, by enlarging the education team to include disabled people. Certainly, face-to-face programmes are likely to be considerably enhanced if disabled people are trained as educators and communicators.
Deafness
Certain afflictions cut people off from the world in special ways. Deafness is one of these. Educators will want to work with those who use sign language. They will also want to ensure that television broadcasts and large scale events have subtitles or other visual signs, or that special television programmes for the hearing impaired deal with preparation for elections. In
general, societies that have alternative educational opportunities for disabled people are more conducive to voter education. Those with reduced facilities are always going to be at a disadvantage unless their society has an ethic of care and incorporation.
Blindness
With the development of improved technology for the production of braille materials, it is possible to replicate many of the materials for sighted people. And where an election authority has prepared for blind people to use their own braille ballots, such materials will need only to be adapted to provide good information on how to make use of this system. Where braille materials are not available, and voting has to take place with assistance, legislation should make sure that the normal concerns for secrecy are not overlooked for the blind.
Those who are disabled do not thereby become unable. The blind can hear, the deaf can see. Voter educators will use methods that take this into account. For the blind this means radio, audio tape, oral communication; for the deaf, illustration and demonstration.
Accessibility
All disabled people need one additional message. And this message needs to be communicated universally through choice of images in posters, television and displays. This message is that the disabled can vote. A climate of acceptance and accessibility should follow the arrangements for this in the election authority. While there will be those disabled people who will vote despite the constraints imposed upon them, election authorities and educators who take the care to remove these constraints are needed.
Where the necessary arrangements have been made, whether for special voting services, such as use of a mobile ballot box, or special voting stations in institutions, or for wheelchair access or voter assistance programmes, this specific information has to be publicised widely. Here the networks and institutions that work with the shut-in and disabled should be alerted in good time, as they need both to communicate this information and to make any special arrangements.
