Any views expressed within media held on this service are those of the contributors, should not be taken as approved or endorsed by the University, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University in respect of any particular issue.

Accessible polling cards: Keeping it low-tech

Card voting based on colours, text and shapes are an accessible way to do quick polling in small groups.

There can be a myth that if you work in digital, everything must be digital. Get the latest app or high-tech solution for your problems.

And don’t get me wrong, there are loads of people at the University working hard on these solutions.

However, I admit defeat at using interactive polling (I’ve tried both TopHat and Poll Everywhere) for the Effective Digital Content training, and I’ve gone back to the luddite approach.

It was at a workshop run by Rolf Molich (who developed the CPUX qualification) that I first saw the simple polling technique of holding up a coloured card to openly vote in a quiz or survey.

CPUX: User Experience certification

It’s a great, straightforward technique. Looking round the room, it’s easy to see what the consensus is or where opinion divides. I decided it was much easier than fiddling with logins, limits on responses, and errors that took time to fix.

Colour blindness

It’s a great technique… unless you don’t see colour well. Someone with dichromacy might not be able to tell the difference between a red and green card; or a green and yellow.

Colour blindness- Wikipedia

So when I decided to use the cards approach, I firstly made sure I got the most contrasting four out of the card colours available in the Playful Engagement trolley.

What is Playful engagement? – Blog site

Secondly, I also wrote a letter on each card corresponding to answers A, B, C, and D (A and C, the two most contrasting colours, also have T and F one the back for basic true/false polling).

Other visual impairments

But what if someone’s vision impairment means they struggle to see both the letters and the colours?

The last thing I did to the card set was to snip corners away to make them into different shapes:

  • ‘A/T’ (yellow) has no corners missing
  • ‘B’ (blue) has the top right corner missing
  • ‘C/F’ (red) has the top two corners missing
  • ‘D’ (green) has the leftmost two corners missing

Four cards - A,B,C and D, as described in the blog post

In my first experiments, I’d cut away the bottom left corner for one of them, but it occurred to me that that’s the corner most people would hold it up by, making it harder to see. So I kept the changes top and right.

I’ll be trying out the cards at Effective Digital Content this afternoon, and they’ll be available for our team to use at workshops.

What is Effective Digital Content?

2 replies to “Accessible polling cards: Keeping it low-tech”

  1. Karen Beggs says:

    Great approach. So simple, yet so much in there.

    1. Lizzie Cass-Maran says:

      Thanks Karen! It seemed to work pretty well at the first session – although of course you never really know when it’s going to come in most useful because you can’t know what people’s accessbility needs are. I’ll come back with any updates!

Leave a reply to Karen Beggs

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

css.php

Report this page

To report inappropriate content on this page, please use the form below. Upon receiving your report, we will be in touch as per the Take Down Policy of the service.

Please note that personal data collected through this form is used and stored for the purposes of processing this report and communication with you.

If you are unable to report a concern about content via this form please contact the Service Owner.

Please enter an email address you wish to be contacted on. Please describe the unacceptable content in sufficient detail to allow us to locate it, and why you consider it to be unacceptable.
By submitting this report, you accept that it is accurate and that fraudulent or nuisance complaints may result in action by the University.

  Cancel