Last Updated on: 24th November 2013, 03:44 pm
We said yesterday that voting with the Assistive Voting Tech went relatively smoothly, aside from the machine inexplicably telling Steve he had selected the sip and puff device when he had decidedly not sipped and/or puffed into anything. So, I thought it would be nice to give them a little feedback, most of which was a big ol’ woohoo, and a request that these suckers be in more polling locations. If only I knew how hard it would be to give feedback!
I went to the first place one would go to give feedback, that being the contact us link on the page. Yeah, contact, give feedback, you’ve got it. I found a customer service feedback form in PDF. I thought here we go.
I opened the PDF, and found that I could only get a few characters per line. Ug! That’s painful. But I soldiered on. On the positive side, I did notice that the edit fields were editable and the radio buttons were checkable! Despite the difficulty in filling it out, I was happy that I could.
Then I went to save. It was at this point it warned me that I would only be saving a blank form, and all data would be lost! What the, who the, huh?
So, because I’m stubborn, I went back, and somehow found their accessible customer service policy, and found another feedback form about 12 pages inside that. Don’t worry, I didn’t sift through 12 pages of goo. They did have nice happy headings.
But even there, there were weird radio buttons or checkboxes that I could see were checkboxes, but couldn’t manipulate them. I also emailed Elections Ontario.
While I was contemplating how I would extract that form from the giant document, the good folks at Elections Ontario responded, and told me where I should go to get a proper form. The feedback form specifically dealing with accessible customer service could only be found under accessibility overview, a link which I cannot find anywhere on the Elections Ontario homepage. Can you? It’s a challenge. Prove me wrong. I can see the web accessibility link, but no accessibility overview.
Um, why not put a link to this form under contact us like the regular link? Sure, put one under accessibility overview, but put one under feedback. That would only make sense. And why go to such lengths to hhide the accessibility overview? They’ve made voting, and everything else, pretty easy I have to say. Why make this so hard?
So, if you would like to give feedback about your own voting experience, go at it. The form is there, in word and PDF. I think I have to say the hardest part of this whole experience was giving feedback!