Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
We inform. You decide.
Thursday, March 28, 2024
NEWS  |  CAMPUS

UF group receives funding for voting accessibility project

A voting program focused on accessibility developed by a team now at UF is being awarded by the Knight Foundation as part of its $3.2 million Knight News Challenge.

The challenge seeks to reward those with innovative ways to provide voters with better information and increase participation before, during and after elections.

Prime III, the UF program, provides voters with the ability to use a touchscreen, voice commands or a button switch along with constant narration. The result is an all-purpose voting system that could change the way voting is done, making sure it doesn’t discriminate against disabilities.

“People have died in this country for the right to vote,” said Juan Gilbert, a UF professor and the founder of the program. “Our election, our democracy is at the very fabric of this country. It’s our right to vote.”

Normally, there is a voting station set aside for people with disabilities such as blindness or deafness. The idea behind the Prime III system, Gilbert said, was that everyone would vote on the same machine, no matter their disabilities. This would remove the need for special voting stations.

Also a result would be a rise in voter participation, particularly among the disabled, said Lawrence Kenny, a UF business professor and specialist in election turnouts.

The main goals of the program are to make voting more accessible, secure and useable by everyone. It was just conventional wisdom, Gilbert said.

Now, with the $35,000 from the Knight Foundation, the project is moving to become open source, which means that it would be freely available for download and use. The team is looking to release the open-source program in September, although there is no set date.

“We decided to make Prime III because we wanted to ‘change the world’, that’s our lab motto,” wrote Naja Mack, 26, a  UF graduate student in human-centered computing and a member of the team, in an email.

Prime III has been tested and approved by a very large population of voters, Mack said. Pilot operations continue to be run out of states like New Hampshire, Oregon and Wisconsin.

Originally started in 2003 by Gilbert and his research team, Prime III is the latest incarnation of the accessible voting project. Before, it was a standalone program, but now it can run on HTML, meaning it can be accessed through a Web page.

Looking to the future, the program is also looking to release in other languages and continuously improve, Gilbert said.

Enjoy what you're reading? Get content from The Alligator delivered to your inbox

“It’s a game changer,” he said. “It will make voting more accessible to people with disabilities, it will make voting more accurate, it will make voting more affordable for the state.”

[A version of this story ran on page 5 on 8/3/15]

Support your local paper
Donate Today
The Independent Florida Alligator has been independent of the university since 1971, your donation today could help #SaveStudentNewsrooms. Please consider giving today.

Powered by SNworks Solutions by The State News
All Content © 2024 The Independent Florida Alligator and Campus Communications, Inc.