Brain Injury & Accessibility of the Electoral Process in Canada

This project focused on identifying barriers to voting and electoral employment for individuals living with brain injury. To identify barriers and potential solutions we conducted a wide range of data gathering through online surveys, focus groups, interviews, environmental scans, literature reviews, and design sessions.

Project funding

This project was funded by Accessibility Standards Canada for the purposes of providing information to facilitate accessible election standards in Canada.

Community involvement

A top priority of this project was to ensure that people with lived experience were involved throughout the project’s life-cycle. This included having insight from individuals living with brain injury, caregivers, and professionals who served as an advisory group. This group helped guide the project, overseeing data collection methods, helping form our recommendations, consulting over research and our results.

We also had individuals living with brain injury and caregivers participating in the research as participants. Through our research, individuals living with brain injury were able to share their experiences with the electoral process and employment in elections. Once we identified barriers in the electoral process, we also had participants come back and share their thoughts on how to design solutions to the barriers. These solutions, that were created by the community, form the basis of our recommendations to the government. One example of these participant suggested solutions were the proposed changes to the voter information card, pictured below. Participants worked with researchers to re-design the card to best suit individuals living with brain injury.