president to visit? >> two things. how we covered the region on a daily basis is we have the biggest network of independent journalists in cuba. for use that television has been going, has been in business, we've been creating and posturing journalism, independent journalism. but ironically with all the journalists, to register to cover the obama visit, the government doesn't recognize any independent journalist so they were declining it. >> what does that mean? >> it was one of the biggest thinkers at the university in cuba. he is well-known in all of latin america. he has great quote but one of the ones i use, e-mail address is, the first, i have it in

spanish so i'm translating to the first duty of them is to be able to think by himself. >> what do you do here for voice of america? >> i'm the director for voice of america to persia. we broadcast into iran and the equator, persian gulf region. the persian populations of the region. >> hub is the persian speaking population? >> our main audience is a randall dent afghanistan, tajikistan. that's what we refer to our audience, the audience is, not only the audience. >> alone has the persian language division been around? >> it started during world war ii. our brand has been known to iranians for 70 years now and it started as a radio news service. it was to cover the war but also to help advance the alex

interest among the persian population and among the persian speaking population. the internet in iran is tightly controlled and heavily filtered. tens of thousands of websites are blocked and even most popular ones the social media, facebook, twitter and so forth. we know that for a fact because the website is blocked. people have to go through virtual private networks to get to our website. just to make sure that big brother is not watching and they can get to what we have. it is, according to freedom house, it's a very restricted society. the same as china for its internet is concerned to freedom house also lists iran at the last of those customers internet freedom is concerned to despite all the difficulties, the

shutdown, the blocking of all the sites, popular sites and so forth. our website last year, just last year in 2015, jumped 43% as far as views were concerned mainly it was thanks to the nuclear deal and the heated political debate going on in this country. we are moving forward with out r internet despite all the difficulties iran is creating and i'm sure it will continue. >> you been watching the community at the voice of america broadcasting board of governors facility in washington, d.c. more of our tour next week. >> c-span founding chairman bob rosencrans passed away last week at the age of 89. not only was he one of the first cable operators to support the idea for c-span but he continued to work on our behalf for almost 40 years.

♪ ♪ ♪ >> i want to introduce to the gentleman on the right who is bob rosencrans. of was our first chairman of the gentleman who threw in the first seed money to get c-span started back in 1977, believe it or not. >> in august 1977, bob rosencrans, then president of the u.s.-colombia cable and his business partner with the first cable operators to agree to support the idea for c-span. at the time only about 19% of american homes were wired for cable. bob rosencrans wrote a check for $25,000. without seed money, c-span created the infrastructure to

send out cable television's first live view's obvious house of representatives on march 19, 1979 to some 3.5 million homes served by 350 cable systems. >> but the public understand what goes on in washington, what the issues are and how to deal with them. and i think above all mission at c-span has been just that, and we're very proud of that. >> bob rosencrans steered the nonprofit through its initial challenging years and continued to serve in c-span's board of directors until his death. most recently in the role of chairman emeritus. spinning to believe that the nation can only benefit from more exposure to our political process, to educate and for our people both young and old, and give us all a bitte better feelg that we are persisting in this process that carries our nation forward. thank you very much.

>> q&a continues tonight. q & a airs today an at all this week at 7 p.m. on c-span2. and booktv prime time tonight focuses on a look of memoirs. those programs start at 8 p.m. >> coming up at about 1:15 p.m. we will return to this conference on voters with disabilities. this afternoon we will kick off with a discussion about making electronic communications director to disabled voters and

editors but it is the outreach director with the democratic national committee. the final panel is on the ways of encouraging handicapped voters to participate in the political process at the grassroots level. up until the a panel from this morning's session. >> good morning. as jennifer said my name is philip pauli and will not be showing the clip from unsolved mysteries today. but it is on youtube. what i do want to talk about our friends, neighbors, loved ones, family members. as jennifer said there are one in five americans who have disabilities. in total that means there are over 56 million americans with one type of disability or another. to put the and different context, that means there are 40 million voting age people with disabilities out there. as we will talk about today, those votes can swing elections.

they can swing competitive house and senate races, turn the outcome proud of the presidential election. we will be talking about why that matters, how you can get more involved and we will be talking of what you need to know and how we can work together. sal as jennifer said, respectability exists to be a voice in the arena. there are many voices to get in the disability community could all have our places and a part to play. so want to take you back four years ago to the last presidential election cycle before respectability existed. as jennifer was looking at the challenges facing the disability community she parted with several polling firms to conduct a poll of voters in the presidential election, looking at the lives of disability, which many pollsters never really considered before. we looked at it and we found the majority of likely voters at least knew someone with a disability. we found that there could be

significant response to candidates explicitly talk about disability issues and we found that democrats and women were sometimes more likely to talk about these issues directly. as we said we found 51% of likely voters know someone with a disability or are a person with a disability themselves. building off of that respectively was found in 2013 with a nation to change attitudes in society, to bust statements and to really empower people with disabilities to pursue the american dream. critical to that is economic involved and political involvement. we were founded in 2013 and in 2014 before the midterm election we conducted another poll of likely voters in competitive districts, swing states, places like wisconsin, ohio and so on. that we found a slightly higher percentage of people likely voters who knew someone our were a member of the disability

community themselves. one of the people we worked was dan greenberger what he said was this committee is far bigger than people realize. as we said, this bill impacts more than half of the electorate. easy to break into in terms of people who identify as not knowing if they have a love of a friend with disabilities and those who do. one of the interesting findings is that the likely voters we polled, it broke down in terms of partisanship but along the american spectrum. you saw a solid core group of republicans with disabilities, a solid core group of democrats with disposed and most important of all, independence. the percentages as you can see really match up with partisanship as people identified those without disabilities. and so after the midterm elections and the dust settled from the shellacking we look at

where, what motivated the voters can what got him interested in how they decide on what candidates they asked for. swing voters in those key senate and governor races that we look at found they were much more likely to vote for a candidate who made a top priority of enabling citizens with disabilities to go into employment. the percentages were very solid breaking down right on about instance of republicans, democrats and independents. we found employment was a critical issue. particularly for independent voters, independent women and non-college educated voters. i encourage you to go to our website we have a cross tabs, we have full question or you can look at. one of the interesting things is midterm elections tend to be fairly quiet. not a lot of people out there other than hard-core political geeks get out there on and off your input. we found those with the supposed and voters who have loved ones with disability were excited to get out there and a crucial

election that was people would have ignored. we also did comparison come compared and contrasted. we found that people with disabilities were very concerned about the economy to a greater percentage than other voters. as you can see we have a breakdown insurance what votes, what issues people most cared about and the overriding issue and the voters from the disability community but it was the economy. we credit that very much to the gap in labor force participation rates. as we said it currently only one in three americans with a disability is employed. there's progress being made particularly at the state level but significant challenges remain. if you look at it in the long-term, even as african-americans, hispanics and women have been intrigued workforce in greater and greater numbers, people with disabilities are falling behind. however, the evidence we have found since studies were done, the polls were conducted on

talking with people in the community, both in washington, d.c. and back home in some districts, this matters. this can went elections to estimate the pollster stan greenberg said the issue can affect the outcomes in very competitive races. we have a competitive race, candidates are looking for voters in the margin, picking up votes here and there so they can fight the coalition that will win. we also work with republican pollster whit ayers who said we are accustomed to think the soccer moms, hispanics or value voters but this poll shows americans with disabilities and those who care deeply about them are demographically the ones we need to pay attention to in the future. now, 2016, prime time. i'm going to turn it over to lauren applebaum who will talk about outreach to the presidential candidates. lauren, take it away. >> thank you, everyone.

i know it's an early morning with the metro not working, so we appreciate everyone who made it here. so mike phillips said, he brought up what brought us to why are we paying attention to this issue in the 2016 cycle. to what we decide to do is we sent our young fellows iowa and new hampshire where they spent nearly two months tinting town halls and other meetings with all of the candidates, all 22 presidential candidates ever in the race from the major parties, received visits from our fellows who went and sat in the town halls and asked them critical questions on issues of employment for people with disability and other issues relating to it people with disabilities are wanting to hear from their elected officials. so you will see, here are some pictures and i will describe the pictures are up on the screen.

you have our democracy associate justin schappell anything bernie sanders, if the next picture you two of our fellows taking facility with hillary clinton. the next one with ted cruz, the nixon with marco rubio and condemn those who have a selfie with donald trump. pictures with john kasich and jeb bush. we found it extremely important be reaching out both sides of the aisle. this is disability rights, is not a partisan issue and should not be a partisan issue so we are very careful to reach out and even when it became clear who the nominees might be, we still reached out to all the presidential candidates because just because some is a longer running for president doesn't mean they are not go to some of the influential position in government, indeed and elsewhere who can make a decision that would impact our issues here. >> a few things that we did of

the attending tunnels israel briefings. one of these pictures you will see a picture of representatives from the sanders-bush, clinton, obama and santorum campaigned all sitting down together where they came to listen to a briefing like this. not only those of us from d.c. but we invited disability organizations who were local -- [inaudible conversations] >> hello and welcome back. my name is jennifer laszlo mizrahi and i'm very delighted to have year for this discussion of campaign 2016, and the disability vote community.

there are 56 million americans with disabilities as you will hear more about from doc sweitzer. i'm just going to introduce him. i'm the president of respectability. we are a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization. we do not rate or endorse candidates. we believe very, very deeply that the voters need to and should have access to their voter rights and to information on what every candidate really has their views on disability issues. and s so for this next session m very delighted that it's going to be introduced, moderated by a mentor and friend of mine, doc sweitzer who is one of the original cofounders of respectability. doc himself as a political consultant. he makes a living electing candidates. he's very, very good at it. he has elected prime ministers here case worked on governors

races, and senate races and congressional races the he has elected so many people to public office your i have known him for decades, because when i was a campaign at elections magazine which is a trade journal on the nuts and bolts of how to elect people for public office, every single month the back page was doc sweitzer. and it was asked the campaign doctor. people who are political consultants, political professionals around the country would write to dock, what are the solutions about different campaign ideas. this was against a campaigns and elections magazine did so he is a prose pro with the american association of political consultant and the international association of political consultant. he is known to be one of the most talented political consultants in the world. and so when he said that he would help cofound

respectability, we are obviously extremely delighted. i'm really glad that he is here to not only moderate this panel but to take it off with a discussion of winning messages. because accessibility is key but having the right message is also key. so let me turn it over to doc sweitzer. thank you, doctor. >> thank you, jennifer. it's a real honor to be here and to be part of respectability. i was talking to jennifer earlier and i said i've been running in campaigned for 35 years, seven and campaigned all around the world. and i've heard about every issue, part about veterans issues and seniors issues and the young and the old and students and small business. and rarely, if ever, have i heard about the issue of people with disabilities. in fact, i choked, i said i've heard more about endangered species, the fight for

endangered species in the 56 million people with disabilities in this country. so it's a real honor to be involved with respect to respectability a decrepit great session here today, a great deal. we are going to talk about reaching voters by electronic communications making it more accessible. and i'm going to introduce it to the top a little bit about campaigns and messaging of campaigns. i have a distinguished panel. no, right is sheila newman, president of the new additions, a great new company. new editions is a woman owned small business specializing in professional consulting services to the federal government and how disability education and human services. to her right is cindy ryan, she is the executive management at new editions. so they are double teaming. ryan has more than 20 stitches of experience in first aspects of information of technology including telecommunications information, management, technical writing.

experience in the disability with response those in managing web-based data management tools for disability and rehabilitation for section 508 clients and can project. and follow to the far right, book from facebook. brooke oberwetter manages facebook relationships with think tanks and public policy and advocacy organizations. and other civil society groups on behalf of the u.s. public will seeking. she served as a marriage of strategic indications as the u.s. telecom association, has worked at the competitive edge by this too, edge by this into, they did institute. she's a graduate of denison and has a masters at american university. before we talk about delivering the message i want to talk a little bit about the message. all campaigns are very simple. they have two components, a message and delivery. whether it's a presidential race or whether it's a campaign to

get the ymca to put a new swimming pool in your very simple. message and delivery. our message is for a simple at respectability. we are trying to reshape attitudes so people with disabilities can participate in the american dream. we don't come at it with pity as often campaigns do, or often debate, congressional debate does. we can add, people with disabilities want an opportunity. they want a job. they want a job. for too many people in america with disabilities, that's not there. there are 56 million people in america with disability. that's one out of five. 22 million people in this country are working age, and only 30% are in the workforce. think about that. 30% are in the workforce. not because they don't want to work. the opportunities are not there.

the are companies doing a good job about that. that are states to do a good job about that. we shine a spotlight on those best practices. as i read through the statistics, people that go to for your college after the parents get them out of the basis, about 90% o of the folks after four year college get full-time employment. over people with disabilities who have gone through the same rigors of college and study just as hard, it's about 50%. so that's about half. we need to change that. over all only one in three people, americans with disability have a job. that leaves us over 20 million people and have come workforce potential in this country. that message needs to get out. we need to start shouting as loud as we can. about half the population, 51%, even as a family member or a very close friend who has a

disability. today with new tools at facebook, we can begin taking kate about the need for opportunity for those folks. we respect people with disabilities. let's get that message out as best we can. it's the right thing to do this glue, morally. it's the right thing to give everybody the opportunity of the american dream and that begins with helping people get jobs. so with that undergo turn it over to sheila. i think sheila is first. >> thank you. i'm always pleased to be able to talk about accessibility for people who have disabilities. for 35 years my work has focused on disability issues. tisha am optimistic about the key breakthrough. for one, on friday the national trends and disability employment monthly update showed for the fourth straight month major economic indicators increased for people with disabilities. while the unemployment rate is still extremely low, it's

significant that it is increasing and i exceeded that very small rise of implement to some employers finally realizing that when their environments and information are accessible, people with disabilities can contribute to the company's success. the second reason i'm optimistic is a hybrid more about disability issues in this election cycle than ever before. some people have given one candidate more credit than i think he deserves of increased attention. mocking a reporter that's a disability did get attention but i attribute the increased awareness and inclusion to groups like the american association of people with disabilities, the wrapup campaign, the disbelief is about a project crip the vote campaign, would invite him to simply out of i can respectability which brought us together today and many other advocates and organizations. we need to continue to make sure that these messages get out there. i'm here today to answer the question why should candidates

make their electronic messages accessible to people with disabilities? when i started my company i built a diverse company by design with inclusivity and accessibility at the core of who we are and what we do every day. about 20% of our employees have disabilities. they participate fully in every aspect of her company because we have made accessibility a priority. that's what i can't understand why candidates who spend so much time crafting their messages this reaching a very large percentage of voters because of those messages are not acceptable. people with the disciplines care about the same issues we do, social security, education, health insurance, childcare, equal pay, employment, housing, transportation. dainty disability and deserve as much as any american. according to the census bureau's american communities survey, about 15.6 million of the 35 million voting age people with disabilities did vote in

2012. that's about 58.6% who did find a way to vote despite the and accessibility of the polling places, the and accessibility of electronic information issue from the canada. that number, 15.6 of it compares with a number of african-americans who voted and is larger than the number of hispanics who voted. so as a voting bloc i can't understand why candidates are not doing more to reach them. post americans now get the news and information from a screen with about half of those using a mobile device. since 2008 candidates have relied on their own websites to share information on their policies and platforms, and to campaign digital media to reach those voters. and yet little attention paid to accessibility. even voter registration websites are not accessible. in 2015 the american civil liberties union found that

california was the only state to have a fully accessible voter registration websites. and neither the democratic nominee the republican nominee has an accessible website. hillary clinton has a tab that you can click and it will translate our website into spanish but, while it is probably more accessible, it's not accessible. that means the message and the videos on the site that have not been captured might not be received i wanted every 20 americans who is deaf or hard of hearing. the of the messages on the site and in the accessible word documents in pdf by that reach up to 22.5 million americans who are 18 or older and have vision loss or are blind. why would any candidate ignored a group of people large enough to make a difference in the election when it's not that difficult to make their electronic information accessible? maybe they don't understand what that means.

four types of functional disability, visual, auditory, physical and cognitive may, in fact, the person's ability to utilize a campaign information on websites and in multimedia electronic documentation, e-mail and radio. in general, people who are blind or low vision also use the screen reader software or screen magnification software to access the web. screen readers read texts aloud and screen magnifiers do with the name implies they enlarge the text. people who are deaf, hard of hearing or deaf blind will not information that is provided through online multimedia and less catchy and video transcripts are provided. sometimes the mouth can be difficult to use for someone with limited use of his or her hands, providing keyboard access is imperative for those who can't use the mouse. a good way to reach people with cognitive disabilities is to offer graphics, simple and which will also allow more people to understand the message.

so candidates, people with disabilities want to receive your messages. make them accessible and earn their vote. vice president cindy ryan would be a little bit more on, a broad overview of where to start to make the electronic information accessible. >> thank you, sheila. making electronic information accessible is not difficult or tedious requires knowledge and the result implement that knowledge the guidelines and standards have been developed by the world wide web consortium through their web content accessibility guidelines as well as section 508 of the rehabilitation act and section 255 of the communications act of the world wide web consortium criteria for accessible information are organized around four principles which laid the foundation necessary for anyone to access the web for electronic content the information is be perceivable, it must be operable, it must be

understandable and it must be robust. robust enough that it can be interpreted reliably by wide variety of user agents including assistive technologies the u.s. texas board published specific add-ons to comply with section five through eighth of the rehabilitation act called the electronic and information technology accessibility standards. they list the requirements federal agencies must adhere to in order to make their electronic information accessible including websites, telecommunication product software applications, media, multimedia. you can refer to those guidelines i mentioned for specific details but i will provide an overview of steps that we've taken to make sure electronic information is accessible. websites as you are an important source information to give you understand what's necessary to make websites accessible, that information can be applied across most of the types of electronic information. it's important to note it is easier to build an accessible website from the ground up

rather than trying to remediate it after it's been bill. you should be employing developers who do know the accessibility guidelines and should be making sure any content creators understand the guidelines that are out there. so some tips for accessible websites often keep the screen simply make sure buttons are labeled in the website can be rendered on a mobile device using responsive design. websites must be keyboard accessible, not everyone will be able to navigate using a mouse. you want to label images, photos, charts, graphs, graphics with alternative text that conveys information about the graphic that is provided, and blind and visually impaired users cannot see. you want to label your hyperlinks with useful information, avoid titles such as click here or select this because the person who is blind may not know what the hyperlink needs and they had to start over at the beginning of the

information so that they find the meaning of what that hyperlink is. and do not force hyperlinks to open in a new window because that causes difficulty in navigation assisted technology. use heading tags in websites, like h. one, hq. that may be getting a technical but do not use color as the only means to convey information and do not use flashing information which can induce seizures. used the skip navigation link on your website. so if you were to use screen readers can skip competitive menus and correctly to the content -- directly. you want to be using real text rather than text within graphics. you want to select basic, simple, easy readable fonts. ensure sufficient contrast between the text and the background. you want to avoid small fonts and limit the use of font variations.

a lot of font variations, bold italics all caps and avoid blinking for moving text. for audio or multimedia presentations, you want to provide audio transcript for any audio on your website. the transcript of audio content is a word for word textual representation including descriptions of nontext sounds like laughter or thunderbird per byte synchronized captions for any multimedia presentation. action star in the audio content of a visual presentation into text. captions address the problems faced by users or death or hard of hearing. if this crucial information that is only an idiot other multimedia content, you must provide an audio description. and audio description provides narrative that describes the scene for setting that a blind or low vision user would not otherwise perceived. electronic documents provide information on websites, and

basically if you understand the guidelines for web accessibility, those applies well to electronic documents. if you should be using built-in features of your content creation software in order to make it as successful as possible such a style headings and things, list bullets that are within like a document word, for e-mails, you want to make sure you include a meaningful subject line. you want to organize your message in a meaningful and readable manner with small chunks. avoid embedded images. if you must embed an image make sure it contains alternative tax that describes the image. tried to avoid background images or watermarks that you find with an e-mail stationery. a lot of that is because it makes the text hard to read. avoid special characters like copyright symbol over the emoticons. then there is the social media platform. you want to keep it simple. good design and good content

more often than not leads to accessible content when possible right in plain language. make your contact information available on the social media account big list the primary phone number and e-mail address where a user can reach you with questions including official site media support and accessibility teams because often social media tools have their own accessible tips and support help desk at educators are about to provide those links to your constituents. maker social media content editable through more than one channel. just some of the common things we see in accessibility with electronic information is lack of headings like on the websites she was talking about. poor color contrast them missing text equivalent for equipment. audio descriptions not having transcript. so this is just a very basic overview, and get guidance visit them on the website and through

the web content guidelines and section 508, provides specific details of what you should do to make your information accessible. there are also companies that can explain it and provide information and resources on the web that provide more detailed information. great. >> i'm actually here as a preface and facebook's public policy dean but i will not pretend to be an expert on best practices because they think we're playing a bunch of experts that i would be found it relatively quickly if i were to try to act like one. instead of go to talk about two things. i'm going to talk about the role facebook is point in 2016 elections. a little bit of explanation why it's important. it's the place for online conversation about candidates and issues and current events. the second and went to taco is what facebook is doing as a company to make sure the one in five americans with this dose can take part in the conversation. first let me turn to the

election to facebook is a mission-driven company. that mission is to give people the power to share intimate the world more open and connected. in 2016 in the united states in order to do that people are connecting and sharing about politics and the election more than ever. in the first half of 2016 alone, 89 billion people across the country like, commented, shared her post about the elections. nearly 2.9 billion times. that was before the conventions happen. during this two weeks of conventions, 8500 hours of facebook live content was created. that's almost a full year's worth of video of live video posted of facebook in just those two weeks. facebook is giving people the power to connect and engage the public process the way they never could before. when people are not able to travel to attend party convention, campaign run for presidential debates face-to-face ago, i going to be a part of the moment. this book tools and services

give people the ability to document the voices and events beyond center stage. the clinton campaign recently released amazing footage on face the couple was going on backstage in the democratic national convention which was really exciting. facebook products offer people the opportunity to participate in the debate and force their opinions whether they support what they are seeing or not. this book helps campaigns and candidates reach voters. based advertising products give campaigns the ability to reach specific groups with personalized messages. the level of precision with which you can reach voters on facebook simply decide exist with other mediums and it comes at a fraction of the cost. talking about message and delivery, facebook advertising is one way to get message out and deliver it in a way that is unprecedented. our tools help foster engage in conversation with voters and make political advertising more prevalent. facebook is every campaign these tools, not just major, major we

funded national campaigns the this is new and our political process. as little as 10 years ago there were significantly fewer voices being heard. the candids, analysts and the press were the only people we heard from. on facebook everyone has a voice. facebook provides a window into campaigns that did not previously exist helping voters go beyond a candidates oppose position and get to know them and what makes them tick it gets campaigns critical insights into what voters are talking about and what messages are wrestling. what is facebook doing to make sure the one in five with disciplines can be a part of that conversation? let me go back to our mission come to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. we can't achieve that goal if our service is are not accessible to people with varying abilities. we know assisted technologies, screen readers and browsers, sending software, can help desperate 40 million blind and

285 million vision impaired people worldwide use facebook to connect with your friends and for me. in 2011 facebook assembled and accessible engineering team to focus on making facebook more accessible. this team is help raise awareness to initiatives like our empathy lab which enable engineers in the company to experience firsthand the people with varying ability and network conditions experienced our products. accessibility is become a core part of our culture at facebook and will continue to make it a priority to design, build and procedures that make it easier for people with disciplines use facebook. in addition to bring a special ingenuity we have all the excess of fabric of her company using accessibly by design as a core value. our products are improved by training our engineers, quality assurance testing to ensure our products are easy to use or accessibility, analyzing a set of technology usage, how people are using technology to use facebook and other we met our

products reflect those needs. listen to feedback from the people who use our service. facebook engineers are always get a rating and making improvements. drives a lot of people not actually but hacking things to make them better is deeply ingrained in part o or in jenin culture including our accessible engineering team. in just the last have you we make hundreds of improvements to our site more accessible to recent highlights include allowing people to close caption to they did it upload. this is a process where always looking for ways to improve and we launched the building of advertisers to turn on and added auto captions be we've added navigation cues like headings and then but this is people who use screen readers. we have broad support for high contrast mode and windows on facebook to improve visibility. we have additional keyboard shortcuts for both desktop and mobile experiences that enhance keyboard shortcut navigation. we have custom gestures such as

supporting to think a double taps to interact with the voiceover screen reader for improved accessibility interaction. one of my favorites is the introduction of artificial intelligence to improve the experience of the visually impaired when they encounter a photo on facebook. automatic alternative tax is a new feature that generates the description of the photo object recognition technology for someone who can't see the photo. instead of the impetus thing on the web designer to include a whole lot of information about a photo, we are using machine learning to detect what's happening in the photo. if you're using a screen reader in iowa the weather a richer description of the photo thanks to automatic old text. for example, for a group photo on the beach the person using the screen reader would now here this image may contain three people smiling outdoors. that's much better than the metadata was only be this inevitable. we roll this out in english in april and it now works in 20

languages. as one of our engineers who is visually impaired recently put it, people talking pictures on facebook, and talking in pictures is out of reach for me. with machine learning and automatic alternative text now that photo can talk back. this technology is still in its infancy and is still a ways to go. write the automatic alt text returns a list of faqs going to be great if you tell the whole story of what was going on? are accessibility and research into artificial intelligence is going to help us get there. we are working on new tools recognize objects that appear in videos and visual acuity, a technology that would've value to ask the question what's in it for and get an answer. who's in this photo? what is that cat playing with? what are the eating? this is always a downside for more just a little over a year ago when there were no auto captions in ads and voice over couldn't tell you anything about the photos. how can campaigns take advantage

but facebook's matt king, one of our specialist said in a recent interview, inclusion is powerful, and exclusion is really painful. the impact of doing something like this is telling people who are blind you and billy to participate in the social conversation that's going on around the world is important to us. it same as a person you matter and we care about you. want to include everybody and will do what it takes to include everybody. in this year's historic come historic liberty election year, we are having in 2016, there might be no more powerful message to americans with disciplines than to say that you're going to participate in the conversation that's going on right now is important and it matters. we believe encouraging civic participation is an important contribution to facebook and make and ensuring everyone is included is critical. campaigns will be well served to keep in mind and use the tools we offer such as closed-captioned underuse including the ability to go back and add closed-captioned to buy

video to make the content more accessible this election year. >> brook, that was terrific. kudos to facebook. that's what respectability is all about is shining a light on companies or government that gets it. obviously, facebook gets it. sheila, could you tell me the number of voters that are being potentially missed by the campaigns, yeah, because they're not accessible, their website? >> well, there's a lot of different, we talk about 56 americans, one in five americans. but disability vote turnout and voting difficulties from the 2012 elections, report done fror the research of life for accessible voting said there were 35 million eligible voters. the american federation for the blind says there is 22.5 million americans who are 18 or older

and have a vision loss or are blind. the journal for death education says one of every 20 americans is deaf or hard of hearing. so i collected these numbers come from a lot of different sources but i think important thing within 2012, 15 points six the americans with disability didn't vote. >> this is the standard because it's a huge voting bloc, and seems like the campaigns are missing a big i understand the smaller campaigns but even with all the resources. is this too expensive to make it accessible or is it a time-consuming -- can you explain that a little bit? >> a little bit? >> syndicate answer that probably better that i can't but when you have people who are trained to know how to do it, and i think that would be the investment is the training period so our web developers know, meaning no people with

disabilities use of the technology. so no, it's not expensive. it does take an investment of time to learn it. cindy can give you maybe more information about that. >> is not a whole lot more to add but no, it's not, the training itself is not that difficult or time-consuming. people think we have to make something accessible to think it's going to take a lot more time for a lot more resources or whatever but it doesn't. it really does take knowing what is required and if to intimate that. >> it's not like we have a group of developers to our website. we have a group of accessible experts. our developers are accessibility experts. that's what it takes is for the web developers, the people developing the documents to know what it means to be accessible. >> you start with the premise is makspake it accessible and deliy

and then everything flows from that. i'm not familiar with the facebook and google of the world and everything but microsoft and a lot of products with pdfs were designed to be accessible. may become brooke, you can talk about what's going on in the whole world, as i call the inner web. >> that's a pretty big task to describe everything that's going on in the inner web but i'll give it a shot. i think that companies especially companies that are providing internet services are really waking up to the fact that this is important this is a critical group of people to be reaching the especial a couple like facebook edison mission-driven. our mission is to connect everybody in the world. that leaves nobody out. it's important to be working on technology to help improve the experience for these users. one of the things that i would love to because training as these laser pointed out this issue. making sure that computer

science education includes accessibility training, making sure that within companies is that we're going in to try to make things accessible after the fact but building into the court experience at the outset. those are think some of the bigger in that companies are starting to do and it's great to see. i know it is the goal of our accessible to the facebook to make sure across are inching organization people are understand and cognizant of this need to get something that's built into the orientation process for our engineers and i would assume it's happening similarly at other companies. >> i joke about the inner web but i'm in the startup world law because my daughter is. could you talk to me about what's, it's changing so rapidly, so many startups. you must see new technologies every day. can you talk, anybody talk about that?

>> i will just say as far as seeing the increase in accessibility with some of microsoft, word and some of the other product they are thinking about accessibility. word i know a lot of people think is accessible to begin with. it's not. if you use built-in features like tables and things that they put in there, it can be both accessible and require very little remediation or things like alt text. that's great that you have that automatic text but people don't have that so have to put in any word document or pdf or what have you got to make sure you have correct all the end it does describe what is in the picture. as well there has been a huge increase in accessibility in the software content creation software but it's not perfect. >> even when a product can be accessible like microsoft word or, it still is the person who

is creating an economic it inaccessible. so if they know what not to do as well as what to do, then it makes it much, much easier. >> looking into the future of its the one of things we are going to see is an increase undermines of artificial intelligence, to make these experiences more accessible. one of the issues if it does take training and take knowledge of effective to coordinate entities tags or go in and introduce alternative text. if you don't have to do that, that's because the machine does it for you, that would be a great improvement in accessibility. >> let's do old school for a second. i deal with things like radio ads and television ads. how do you make a radio ad accessible or more accessible? >> radio, which wanted to if you're going to be doing radio ad is make sure every transcript available on your website or on the internet beforehand if

possible come if it's a lie if it makes you get the transcript on the website or on the internet as quick as possible. the transcript for the audio is what's important. >> and television? close captioning? you have any sense of how much is closed captioned in america in terms of that's? >> that i don't. >> is there any speeding up the process about or any cats that you see when you do that? >> just like burkett said, facebook buys you to create your own youtube, why should great your own but it still typing in that word for word. just like our part today we have the computer assisted realtime translation. she's typing in the words but using a court reporting technique i would imagine. that's typically what they do. but no, right now i don't know of anything. >> is this a startup we should give?

>> the research is happening, speech to text translation is a definitely a field were asked but that don't impress the opportunities for accessible are going to put as will the we are at the very beginning i think i've seen how technology can really help with making websites more accessible. i think the last probably 10 years or so where the story of these companies building up a now that we make them accessible your best friend right now is important but i think it's important as we move forward for companies cannot just say we build something from now let's make accessible. but to start with let's build something accessible which is a different starting point. >> and voice recognition software is so good now. i never type a text. i just hit my little microphone and said it. so i would think that it is going to become easier for captioning as well through voice-recognition. >> so the voice recognition software is now at a level that can even -- >> i'm the expert on that. but i would think that we should

be using that more for captioning. >> right. do we have questions from the audience? any questions? yes. >> i'm actually a communications fill out respectively. i've been filming this and i use osha me a lot for respectability also like my personal life. one of the things i've noticed is that there is no really good way to request a specific accessibility feature. like i was excited when energy guys are working on ai, voiceover for videos because like there really isn't anything for that right now. it's like your vision impaired. you are pretty much just i can have hope and pray that the audio and video describe the information you need. so mike how can we as users request information about, how can we request like features to

be developed and direction for companies to export that they might not necessarily think of on their own? >> i can only speak to facebook's experience in this regard. have a page on facebook that is moderate and we try to, people come to that and leave feedback but they say this isn't working the way i think it should or you can try this. we have a feedback form. where the whole section about accessibility issues and an opportunity to submit exactly that kind of feedback. these technologies are relatively new and we're working to improve and. i think the ability for descriptive additional text in the it is going to be great. if the technology is still being developed but it is something at least that facebook i can say is invested heavily into it and is looking into. >> any other questions? does anybody else have a question? let me ask you this question.

we now, the campaigns, huge campaigns have the ability to pay for this at a time and the ability to hire people and everything. can you talk about smaller campaigns and people that are out there and how they might use this technology, be able to tap into this large pool of voters that are basically not reached right now? >> i don't take it makes a difference whether it's a large campaign or a small campaign. it's just that investment in time to learn what it means to make something accessible. .. if you have a huge website with thousands of pages and you have

paid no attention to assess ability you will have to remediate some of that. if you hire the developers who know assess ability from the start or train your developers then it just doesn't add the cost. >> it's all about starting day one saying we will make it accessible and understand. >> yes, although you can remediate. if i were either candidate i would have somebody remediating my website tomorrow. >> i am sure they are listening, too. at least one will get that message. facebook is already there. that's a huge advantage for smaller campaigns. they are already there. >> it is a huge advantage and we encourage small and large campaigns to take advantage of the tools we have. i think another advantage to the facebook platform as i mentioned in my remarks was the ability to actually do some really specific outreach to people with disabilities in order to get the

policy messaging to them in a way that isn't happening in a lot of other venues. as you all have remarked upon here, it's just not something we are caring enough about in the campaign. we are hearing more this year than we have in years past but the ability to tap into that is something that is quite easy to do with facebook advertising in a way that can't be done with television advertising just because you are able to reach such a specific segment of voters that you're trying to with the policy message. do you have any numbers on how many people with disabilities are facebook users? >> i do not have that in front of me. i'm sorry. >> this is not a political question, do commercial enterprises understand this, are they ahead of the curve? are they behind the curve? >> i think commercial is actually getting it.

we have seen a lot, a big increase in a lot of commercial entities asking for assistance and understanding the requirements and guidelines and there is also in the federal sector, they are increasing their ability to monitor and understand the cio council, they have technology group that they are trying to make sure the people understand the vendors understand what type of government they are looking for so we can try to unify and make sure, before before in the past it's been hard to understand how to implement some of these things and now they're unified so vendors understand completely from one agency to the next what they are expecting. >> certainly, the accessibility act. >> can you explain that for the audience.

>> the rehabilitation act was first cat passed in 1973 and i think it's been amended but it requires that government hire people with disabilities, promote people with disabilities and section 508 of that law says they must make electronic information assessable. in 504 it says they have to accommodate people with disabilities. this is the law. any entity, state governments, universities, federal contractors who receive money from the federal government also must comply with that law. there hasn't been any real teeth in those laws until very recently that they've started to look at this. still there is no money so we call it an unfunded mandate. that is one of the reasons assess ability has improved because the government required

it to be assessable. >> i think on the industry side there has been a fair amount of sharing of information and one of the things facebook has worked really hard to do is make sure everything we learn we are able to package and send out to other companies in an open-source format. we have an assess ability toolkit for example that highlights all of the initiatives that we have taken on assess ability and explain how another web developer could go about implementing those in adopting those so if anybody is a developer who's interested in the location of that it's that code.facebook.com/accessibility. >> we have a question out there. >> it strikes me that there might be a private-sector interest in just the larger aging population which is going to grow into being a disabled population if they live long

enough. all of us may think impairments in vision and mobility, do you see any efforts in the electronic community or in facebook to just plan ahead and say we have this enormous market that's growing older and that could link up with issues of disability and we should focus more resources in general on looking at issues of the senior population of coming up. for facebook it's certainly something that, as i mentioned mentioned we are a mission driven company to the extent that baby boomers are part of that world that we want to make more open and connected and of course they are, then not something that will be important to us and it's a place where we we will devote resources. >> yes, sir. >> while he is coming to the microphone, i will just add my 2 cents there. yes, certainly aging, i didn't wear glasses when i was young, i continue to have to get stronger

and stronger and hopefully i won't become one of those 22.5 million that 5 million that need that assess ability but you don't know and one of the things that can cause you to need assess ability. >> i'm bob. in light of our political debate these days, it goes on by twitter and i'm no expert on this, but our tweets assessable at all? do you know if twitter is making any move toward increasing its accessibility. >> i can't speak for twitter but i certainly do know that people who post links to videos that aren't captioned aren't acceptable. people who post pictures on there that aren't, that don't have alternative text aren't assessable. most of what i see coming across my twitter account is not assessable. >> it's not assessable.

>> i can answer a bit more about that. >> twitter is not necessarily my hometown but i do tweet a lot therefore respectability and also personally and you can add alt text but you have to go to settings and assess ability and then you click a little button that says turn on alt text. sometimes that can turn off. i actually had a long time where for some reason my alt text was turned off even though was supposed to be turned on and i had no idea why so i went back and turned that setting on. it does have alt text but it doesn't have the automatic ai that facebook has and it definitely is not the easiest thing in the world to set up. video to my knowledge you cannot upload video natively to twitter and add captions. i might be wrong about this but obviously if you've linked to a video without captions, it's in assessable.

>> i have two questions via twitter. so the first one is asking specifically about facebook about uploading files for captions. right now you have to upload an srt file. do you have any idea on when you might be able to just type it in the way you would on youtube? >> i don't. i know in the spring of this year is when we started doing some auto caption for advertisers. my guess is that we will be looking into ways to do that but i don't have any sort of firm commitment right now. >> and now facebook owns instagram. is that correct. >> correct. >> so the ai for facebook images, is that also occurring on instagram? >> that is an excellent question that i don't know the answer to. i'm happy to look into it and get back to whoever it was on twitter. >> additional questions?

okay, i think we are ready to wrap up. is there any final words? >> i feel like it's jeopardy. >> i just don't understand why the candidates aren't making their messages assessable and i think they should start doing that immediately. >> i would like to add that there are a lot of resources on the internet for making assessable electronic information. you can go and search a lot. there's a lot more now than there ever has been so i would go in search and you can find a lot of good information on the web. >> thank you to all the engineers that facebook and the keep it going. let's not forget our message that 70% of the 22 million working age americans with disabilities in this country do not have a job. 70%% do not have a job. we have to just keep shouting that out everywhere every time we can and were making a difference and let's keep pushing.

>> thank you very much. [applause] >> i thought that was really quite informative. i'm very excited about our next speaker and i'm about to turn it over to him, ted jackson who can start to head up here on behalf of respectability, disability rights organization, an organization that is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, i want to welcome people who are watching us today the speaker that is about to speak has been involved in partisan activity but i want to be sure that you know that we invited the republican national committee and the trump campaign to participate and that we followed up repeatedly and

invited them to participate in this event and i myself personally went to the trump had quarters at trump towers to remind them how much we wanted them to be at this form. i don't want anybody to think that the fact that there is somebody who has been working with democrats and not somebody on the republican side is because were a partisan. we are a nonpartisan organization and we are absolutely delighted that ted debt jackson is here. i did ask him however to be very nonpartisan in his comments so there is not any miscommunications out there about who we are as an institution, i do want to credit the dnc and the hillary clinton campaign for caring enough about these issues. let me tell you a little bit about ted jackson. he most recently served as office of public engagement in 88 community engagement

specialist as the democratic national convention in philadelphia where he helped create in assessable environment for people with disabilities and folks who needed an accommodation at that convention. previously he worked for the community organizing director as the california foundation for independent living. he worked for the disability organization network. that is the due neork. during his time at the due network they celebrate advocacy success which includes california's online voter registration system, the first ada compliant system of its kind in the nation, increasing access to voter education and the accessibility redesign of the bay area rapid trains transit new train card. prior to working in the disability community, he was working on marriage equality

campaigns. in 2004 he was the field director for the successful campaign to repeal article in cincinnati ohio and is a member of the national council on independent living with was appointed by california secretary of state to the voter assess ability advisory committee. let me just also say, he was a man of incredibly high energy and talent. even though he is like a california guy and people think of him as that guy who's been in california, there is not a person who cares about voter rights for people and disabilities in america that doesn't note ted jackson or hasn't been touched by him in some way even if they don't know it. ted jackson, think you for being with us here today. >> i'm a big guy and i'm afraid i'm going to block the caption

so all go ahead and sit down. >> great. >> i'm really pleased and honored to be here today. this is really awesome that respectability is bringing all these folks together to have these conversations about elections and voting's and candidates and the issues that play and mix through all of them. i first want to thank jennifer and respectability and i have to say, it was probably two or three years ago that i discovered respectability and the work they were doing. when i was putting some stuff together for the 2014 election in california, they had done a

poll and i went wow, someone did a poll and for those of you who are really involved in this stuff, you know how amazing that is, but there is no voter data on voter with disabilities in voter registration files. the fact that an organization did that work with pollsters to do the painstaking work of matching up voter data with people with disabilities was amazing. it's something that we need more of. i'm going to touch on that in my remarks probably a little bit later. i was so excited that i reached out. i started this relationship and it's been great. the place i want to start with my comments, i came politically, i've always been a person with a a disability but was not a disability advocate. i had advocated for myself in situations but politically i was

in lgbt q advocate and worked on campaigns. i kind of dropped out a little bit early from the lgbt q movement because i wanted to work on electoral campaigns but that is where i came from and it was through working on the fair education act in california that i came to work in the disability community. what that law does is it implements disability and lgbt q history into k-12 california classroom. the world just kind of opened up to me. it was interesting for me because it was at a time when the seachange was happening on american equality in many issues in the legislature. here i was going into the legislature and organizing people us across the state of california on disability issues and was getting knocked down.

meanwhile all my friends who are still in the lgbt q business are now finally getting all of their bills passed and signed. it seems like each session we were coming up against in-home support services but we do everything differently in california so in-home support services is what you folks in the recipe rest of the country would be community based services. every year there a negotiation in the legislature. every year there was something they were trying to take away from it or change or something like that that we were fighting to keep on. in california, it's the state of notification bills. these ada notification bills that chip away at people's rights in the americans with disabilities act. every year we would fight them and beat them down. some of them got past and in my time i had to watch two of them get passed and signed. it was terribly painful to see

that. meanwhile all my friends who had worked on lgbt stuff were still getting all their stuff passed and signed. i took a step back about two or three years ago and thought what is it. what was the power that they built up that they can present these bills and get votes on both sides of the aisle and a republican governor or democrat governors during that time will sign. really what it was was electoral power. i realized our community builds up advocacy power. there are a lot of gains but the one thing we don't have is electoral power. that's the power that holds elected officials accountable to the ballot box. it isn't necessarily because we don't vote.

what it is is matching the person to something in the voter file and being able to catalog and do list building. to be able to walk into an office and that person knowing that the organization has 500,000 members who are registered to vote. that's really what electoral power is and that's what the lgbt community has done over several marriage battles in the state. they had organized their community in response and had also done list building. they had done voter registration and increase their community's ability to turn out and vote. because of the list building piece of it, they could recontact them in an emergency moment to do grassroots lobbying

that is kind of the picture. we have been very successful in the disability community but we are always coming back to fight the same battle and i would really like to get onto the next thing. i would like to talk about self driving cars instead of fighting the same ada notification bill every session. i began to start thinking about that and how we are going to build electoral power. i started having these conversations a couple years ago with folks in the disability world. last year they were building up all of this amazing energy around the 21st anniversary of

the ada. if anyone had been to the nickel conference last year it was absolutely incredible. it it was such a huge celebration. literally at the awards dinner, mark johnson said we can't let this go. we have to turn this into voting. that's our next next big thing. i think what happened in that year was that people naturally gravitated towards it. they understood the 25th anniversary of the ada allows people to take a look over the past 25 years and remember what life was like before the americans with disability act, to remember the fight that they went through to get it passed and to remember all of the act advocate sees that had to happen to defend it and then to dream about the future and where we can take it. there were lots of youth panels across the country. my organization in california did a 200 person national conference where we dreamed about the future.

in dreaming about the future, i think folks realize that in order to do those things we have to have our elected officials at the home of our centers of government, not just here in washington d.c., but all the way down to your local township. we started thinking about voting and building this electoral power. i started speaking on and more people came to the table and more people came to the table and what we eventually did is we built a training program. last year we trained about 50 people at the conference and we trained another hundred people on how to develop strategy. all of this nonpartisan. at the april conference and then this year we went on and did ten trainings throughout california, trainings in georgia and

trainings in massachusetts. that training went on whether i stepped out of the nickel conference this past year just a couple weeks ago and then a group called rebbe sprung together. they are taking off like wildfire and they are really committed to voter registration. they formed the national disability voter registration league this year over 40 satellite organizations in states participated and just to give you a picture of how this is coming together, i wrote the states down that are participating. you had had groups from d.c., illinois, iowa, massachusetts, michigan missouri, montana, new,

new jersey, california, pennsylvania, texas, virginia, west virginia and wisconsin. some of them had a dozen sites in each of them. this is really starting to kind of explode and it's absolutely wonderful to see. my caution for the community is, as we really develop these nonpartisan voter outreach and tv efforts is that we are maintaining data practices. we need to learn from the history of the suffrage movement. we are learning from the history of the civil rights movement. we are learning from the history of the lgbt q movement and the women's movement. we need to learn about how these folks brought people together, got them organized and then maintained their data, their name their phone number there at

right now, counting is everything to it i tell folks in my organizing teams that everyone counts. what everyone counts means is that we don't take anyone for granted. everything needs to be translatable in numbers. numbers are the only language on the earth that will really tell you where you work, where you are now and what you need to get to where you want to go. so, we need to start putting in some of these grassroots, the quality that were doing around voting. it's not just about registering as many people as possible but

it's about registering people with disability and maintaining a relationship with them because were maintaining their data and reporting those numbers. we need to let her elected officials know that our organization registered 122 people last month. a perfect example of this is a campaign that we ran in california. it was this past year before i left and came to the dnc. we spent time training folks all over california and in total we've trained almost 500 disability organizers across the country, i'm not sure how many of them are going to activate themselves and do campaigns, but 11 group that we trained in hayward california itches in the east bay said let's go for it. let's do a campaign for the primary. they went out and got some funding, always an important thing. there are questions about funding and assess ability in the last panel and funding always is necessary.

we ran a nonpartisan campaign. their youth ran in incredible social media campaign but the youth got really involved with it. these were disabled youth who went out every day and registered voters. they did pledge gathering and they went beyond people with disabilities. they went into the community at large and asked people if they cared about issues that were important people with disabilities. they catalogued that information we began to build a voter base. in total i think there were seven or 800 people in their voter base. we concentrated only on the city council elections that was happening at the california primary. then of course, we layered on top of it a list building vendor. we did list enhancement. we were able to marry the list

from this particular center to their list plus the ones that we had and in that city we identified 2500 people who were registered to vote and were people with disabilities. of course we did whatever every campaign does in the phone banks began. we didn't knock on doors, we did phone banks. we we reached out, we did a little bit of direct mail, we did a little bit of e-mail but we did phone banks every day. we contacted these voters. we also did an education piece with the forum. we engaged with the candidates to let them know we were doing this and interestingly, for candidates decided to talk about disability issues on the campaign trail. that was surprising. we've always had a good relationship with city council but candidates never talk about disability on the campaign trail. when the election came and it was over with, the four candidates that talked about disability issues on the campaign trail worthy for that

one the at-large race. we had identified 2500 voters. the votes spread between the fourth position in the race and the fifth position was 2300 votes. so this little organization, the center for independent living now has a level of power with their elected officials in their home community that they never had before. that's what electoral power is. if i can do anything today or if i do anything in my life, in in my professional life in the disability world it's to really paint that picture for folks but also help make it a reality in communities where they can see this. the flip side of this, and the hard part for them as they decide to engage in this was they had to give up their other activities. you can't do everything all at once.

you really can't. while it was important that in may the budget is going on in california, that's when all of the lobbying and advocacy happens around the different programs they had to say this year we are not going to participate in that. this year, that's painful, right right because funding is what keeps it going and keeps our programs going. that's very painful. they understood the risks to build this power that they were then going to recruit greater energy from government and greater support down the line and in the future. that's always the hardest thing when i talk to different disability organizations is tell them it's election time, we need to maybe not spend as much of

our staff time on the policy pieces right now. i would encourage everyone to be thinking of that. in the next 92 days, what is the most important thing you can do? is the most important thing you can do a study on home and commuted ebay services or to write a memo on it or go talk to staff here in the building? or is the most important thing that you can do say i'm going to write that in november or december. i'm lena do that in november or december but for the next 90 days if i have the structure and the funding, maybe what we ought to do with our time is make sure our members get out to vote. maybe we ought to call them on the phone and concentrate solely on that and build some power for ourselves. electoral power, the easy equation of what elect a world is is usually organized people

plus organize money and the number one thing i hear from disability organizations is we have no money. i think it's true, we don't have membership bases that drive our fundraising. a lot of our organizations have lists of people that we can't use for stuff like this because they are protected by hepa and they are folks that are lower income. we do have organize money. we have a lot of education dollars that you can use for voter education. it's all nonpartisan and there are groups now that i've been talking to that are starting to get the understanding that we have a ton of voter education money and we consistently haven't used it for that. we have a hotline on election

day or developing a fire. of course were going to have election -- a hotline on election day and we should do community outreach but are we using that money wisely enough question but can we also take that money and add something onto it for those of us who have that kind of money to do voter education pieces that go directly to the voter. making sure they know when election day is and where to get their materials, making making sure their materials are available to them in an assessable format. doing advocacy pieces. the most painful part for me is that i do a lot of voting advocacy. i helped work on getting online voter registration made assessable in california and the following year the aclu did a study that we were the only fully assessable one in the nation. i love to do stuff like that.

that's collection related that i even have to say no, i'm i'm an organized people for this. of time so i can have a better strength base to do that work after the election. just a few things i want to go through and then open it up for questions. what is our time look like? >> okay. >> i wanted to talk a little bit about electoral power which i just did but i also wanted to give a picture of our community and where they are regarding voting. i think we heard some of the statistics in the last panel, i snuck in part way through. there were some really great information. one of the things that i think is important for all of us to understand as we go into discussions about specifics and about what our trends show is that none of our numbers seem to be as perfect as other communities and the reason is we are not on voter registration cards.

i actually believe that is the single point, if we were to do one thing that would change everything or that would open doors, it would be to get a request for accommodation or requests for voter education materials in alternate format added to the voter registration card. >> can you explain that. >> definitely. >> the reason is when we are not on voter registration cards we are not in voter databases for the state or campaigns and polling companies to pull from. we are also not being studied as significantly by universities around the country. i just did a study after two or three years of pushing, sometimes i push a little bit with the university of california davis. what they tell us is we can't do

a random sampling. that's really huge. you really can't do a random sampling of people of disabilities throughout the united states because the list doesn't exist. we really only have parts of the community and they have a lower income part in the protected. >> let me just jump in. so when you are a political consultant or candidate and you want to talk to voters you want to get a list and you want to have information about the people on that list. when somebody registers for their drivers license the record when you were born and whether you are male or female and whether you are white, black, hispanic et cetera. nothing about disability is there. therefore when the candidate wants a list of voters with disabilities it does not exist.

that's what he's talking about, voters, the candidates might say as you heard from congressman brad sharman in an earlier segment they want to do something for community and then they want to communicate to that community that they did it but if they don't have a list how are they going to communicate it to them? >> and i'll take it a little further. i was going to eventually and there but the piece that's interesting to me is that if universities aren't studying us as a random sampling, the media is not reporting on us because they're not reporting on the pole and the candidates aren't talking about our issues. there is a direct link. it's even bigger than this. i'll give an example. in california will relaunch to the health care benefits campaign, they did a market

research. what was the of they used? voter data. they launch their healthcare benefits benefits exchange without an assessable website and without any access structure within the organization to sign people with disabilities up for healthcare. now we all know people with disabilities that are employed or underemployed or underpaid. it's that middle ground. they need the health care benefits. the data comes where it's more than just a relationship between a studied campaign or as jennifer brings up being able to connecting contact directly with that voter. that data is being used in other places now. getting on that voter registration card, i think is the single most important thing that we could actually be advocating for in our state. i will tell you, the push back on it and you will this at the county level as well, we already have to provide all of the

assess ability pieces. that is true, but under federal law we already had to provide all of the languages based upon a formula. we have added language. it has made it easier for campaigns to connect with ethnic groups and cultural groups based on race and ethnicity. these things all work together. it's the real important piece for me and it's why our numbers can be so different. jennifer organization with two pollsters, democrat and republican ran an excellent pole, the national council on disability ran an excellent pull. those numbers are so far apart from one another in the same year, it's very interesting. i say that going into this but

basically up until 2000 we had about 11% voter. this community voted 11% last year. by 2012 that gap had closed by almost 6%. what happened between 202,012? there were some america votes acts in the pop-up program that came out of it is what happened and all of the sudden counties had money for assessable voting machines, they had money for making pics assessable and adding ramps and doing whatever they could. what we know about that first half of the voter gap group was that physical access that was solved by this funding was thrust into the pole. what was keeping them away were these physical barriers.

i worked with uc davis and we did our own study in 2014 to look at the second group. the thing that's interesting about the second group is why don't they come? well, a lot of this is anecdotal evidence and we can't do the random sampling stuff but what were finding is that folks feel like the candidates aren't talking to them. they're not talking about their issues, the not connecting with them they don't come and knock on their door and so there's a whole world of feeling lost in this election. when we talk to them and focus groups and when we talk to them in small groups about these issues and what would happen if a candidate talk to you, the interesting thing is they become more engaged, they become more interested but the physical access peaks is still the cherry on the sundae. it's like you can do all this

but you've got to have the physical access or intellectual access. >> we want to be able to take questions from the audience here and if you have a question please come to the front to the microphone so you can ask the question. if you're watching via c-span, please tweet with # pete wd vote. that's persons with disability or people with disabilities vote. if you have a question and you're on twitter and you're watching on c-span anyone ask a question, use that to vote and your question, we will ask justin your question. >> good afternoon. thanks for being here. you mentioned the primary in california where they were able to match up data so they could no voters that had disabilities. what kind of recommendations would you give of the data that's currently available that people throughout the country could access legally to be able

to match up. >> that's a really good question. so i've mentioned several times that the lists of mostly what we have are protected through hepa and some other ways. they should use their consumer list plus their list of donors and people who signed up onto their listserv. they were not using, in their mind, and again these lists all sit with different nonprofit organizations so your own organization has to read the law and figure out for yourself how you're going to deal with this. they read it and felt they weren't selling anything, they were giving the information away, they were simply doing a voter match so was okay to use that list. it was their organization that was contacting these people and reminding them to vote and giving them their education and not using it for any other purpose.

so, i think that's completely appropriate. other organizations read the law and feel differently about it. >> let me add that with facebook you can actually buy an ad that is a code driven and you can put in keywords like disability, ada, autism, down syndrome et cetera and you can come up with a list of words and then you can buy just for that area. if you have no voter file in your running for city council or county commissioner you can just buy the ad for that particular geographic area with those keywords and it works very, very successfully. so i'll give you an example. the new tv show called born this way which features seven individuals with down syndrome was watched launched on the 80 network and it was really driven by facebook viewers.

amy originally didn't put advertising into the show. it was just based on buying facebook ads with words like down syndrome, developmental disability, down syndrome and things like that. it has over 1 million fans at this point and it's been nominated for three emmy awards. that was really done through the facebook advertising which is highly targetable and that is a workaround for these lack of lists that he pointed out. >> hello, i'm i'm a fellow with respectability. mr. jackson, just recently in north carolina and the state of wisconsin, voter identification identification laws were actually overturned by federal court rulings and that actually significantly repealed the voter

id laws which, among everything, disadvantaged voters with disability. what you think think will be the implications of those overturned both in wisconsin and north carolina and perhaps some other state but what you think still needs to be done in terms of laws like the voter a dedication laws wind up disenfranchising people with disabilities and remove their ability to participate in the electoral process? >> first of all to say that it's just my personal opinion but i think all id laws need to go. we need to be equal and fair to folks and people with disabilities, it's significant. i think people with disabilities don't carry a traditional state id or driver's license. there are 19 forms of id that are acceptable and so they may carry one of those.

they are great barrier to voting for many folks. i think the implications, when those court rulings came in, the court rulings opened the door but the implications really belong with people in the state and it's the stuff that i've been talking about, there's a responsibility to to it. when the door opens, the community of its own makes the decision whether they're going to walk in that door however it can. it's up to the people of north carolina and the disability community. it's up to the people in wisconsin and the disability. i'm always there to help them. you can find me on twitter and i'm more than happy to help you in my current job, i'm going to help you turn it blue. that's because that's what i'm really doing my job. there is a certain level of responsibility in any of these

opportunities that happen. from a 30,000 foot view level, myself, jennifer, anyone else, we can't make the community do what we think they ought to do. we can talk about our experiences in building power or policy or whatever it is. the community has to want to do it and has to want to make the priorities. it's like what i said earlier about prioritizing the fall election period. you have to want to put the policy booked down and do the stuff to return to. >> i'm going to take moderators prerogative. >> susan go ahead, you haven't asked a question, oh and we have a? twitter. >> i will try to be quick. i'm with the nonprofit veterans association that represents veterans with disabilities. i'm sorry the trump campaign is not here because i would've

acted as them as i am directing it towards you, but we were reached out to earlier this year by the rnc and dnc to our veterans legislative staff because they viewed us as a veterans organization for also a disability organization. i'm curious, are you coordinating with your veterans liaison at the dnc to amplify the disability vote through the voices of veterans with disabilities? >> how many veterans with disabilities would you say there are? >> there are data for veterans with service connectivity that you can find on va.gov and broken down by state and congressional districts, you can also get some data off social security website about veterans

with disabilities on ssdi, so i think there's something like a million veterans with service-connected disabilities on ssdi. i just wondered about that. >> the answer is yes. the director of outreach for veterans was to desk spaces away from me, we do coordinate. we each have our own area but we are also working together so we identify whether there is crossover area. in the that we do, they're something like disability that comes out, we figure out who's the best messenger for this and whose program is the best to reach out to this particular

constituency group. that type of crossover is important because people with disabilities are not just one ethnicity. people with disabilities are women and men, their black, white, latino, they are younger, their aging, talking about aging and disability, as people are living longer, our group is really going to be growing in the next few years. i heard someone mention the baby boomers earlier. i'm generation x. i will be 50 in three years. i will be 50 in a few years and 50+ is that range of aging into disability. we are typically designed in our society in the way we have our system to handle about one and a quarter or one and a half generations aging into disability. in three years we will have generation acts, yuppies, the meanies and the baby boomers. we will have four different groups aging into disability.

this thing is about to expand. >> lauren if you can just read the different questions from twitter from our c-span viewers that would be great. >> i'm going to read them quickly and answer as many as you can. >> how can people with disability community get disability to be on the voter registration card for registration? >> how can we get nondriving voters to the poll? shouldn't the county help with the buses but another asked how do we address crosscutting identities in pulling and how do you see this changing the way we interpret and use these poll results? i wanted to ask a? our panel earlier we were told neither donald trump or hillary clinton's website are fully assessable. what steps, i know you just started this job last week, what steps will you do to ensure hillary clinton's website will

become fully assessable. >> i will go through them in order. with voter registration card, advocating with your legislators at the state level and secretaries of state. a lot of states have a voter accessibility advisory committee that are appointed by the secretaries. get on that committee and advocate an advocate with secretary's office in your state nondriving, that's one of the things i think i have been pushing. i didn't talk about it today but that's organizing poll rides. we as a community, that's an incredible thing we can start now. we can organize people with disabilities to make sure they have their paratransit reserve to making sure we have shuttles, california considering early vote model with both centers and one of the reasons i supported it early on was that i suddenly realized, every ioc in california could have a shovel and run it every day on the hour

for three weeks and bring people out to vote. i don't know how that would go with the counties being responsible for that but certainly the counties are responsible to make sure you vote. currently, if you can't get to the pool in the united states, they are responsible to bring that ballot or that machine to your house. i think people ought to know that. there is a precinct in california that is 200 miles long. it's in the middle of the desert. that county does drive the machine because at the end of it, on the nevada border there is a person in a power chair. they drive it all the way out there. cross fitting identifications, totally important. i think the more that we get data or data places like the voter registration card where we can start getting that crosscutting is important but

also, just like like advocating with your elected officials, start advocating with these pollsters in the press. one of the things we did at nickel on the voting rights subcommittee was some of our members started meeting directly with members of the press and members of the polling firm. one of them had a series of meeting with pew here in washington d.c. and told them, they started putting front and this is the right thing to do. as far as the website i can't speak for mr. trump's website website and i can't speak for anything on disability with mr. trump's campaign. i think he has, he didn't really speak on it, but he did some live action for us once and i think he speaks for himself on that. hillary's campaign, as far as far as i know, the website is assessable. i know early on when i was in my old job i have had our folks run

through it and it came back assessable. i know they have had folks working on it. i don't know the particular pieces. one of the things from listening to the panel last time was assess ability is so hard to judge when it comes to websites. there's a level of technology that your matching up to other technologies. it's one of the things i really had to bring to the state of california attention in the online voter registration situation because the original online voter registration was assessable through a brand-new computer at the state but it wasn't assessable to the computers that were five or six or seven years old at an independent living center or library or people with disabilities who have in their homes because it could be what they can afford. universally, assessable situations are optimal, especially for a candidate like

hillary who had stepped out on issues important to people with disabilities, made them a major part of her platform and the party's platform in a significant way that has not been matched by any other presidential candidate in our history. i will take that information back and if i can get some specifics i will certainly communicate those. as far as i no, i would would always been under the impression because of our own run through that this is like maybe eight months ago or six months ago that it has been assessable. again, it may not be if you're not using the latest version of jaws or that thing. >> on behalf of respectability i want to remind everyone we are nine partisan, non- profit organization. we did invite the trump campaign and the rnc to participate in this panel but unfortunately they did decline. i am very, very happy that ted

jackson is here and he has addressed his comments in a very nonpartisan way for the majority of the presentation. i want to thank the dnc for sharing him with us and his comments were enlightening and helpful and i'm very energized by his desire to see people develop serious list, serious data tracking. we are getting ready for a very exciting panel on the front line of reaching out to the presidential candidate on both sides of the aisle. these are individuals with and without disabilities who went to iowa and new hampshire and experienced this and they are going to talk to everybody about how they can help at home in their senate races. we will take a five-minute break and will turn around for the next panel. ted jackson, thank you very much

for your comment. >> thank you. [applause] [applause] >> i always speak for myself so it was a respected nonpartisan organization i'm only speaking for myself and my point of view on that. thank you very much. it was wonderful to be here. thank you. [inaudible conversation]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> a short break in this conference on disabled voters and the 2016 campaign. we will get back underway, the final bill about empowering disabled voters to participate in the political process at the grassroots level. write about for clock the host of the group respectability u.s.a. will have an award several academic conference wraps up about five. you can see the whole thing again starting today on our website c-span.org.

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]