On July 2, 2017, all eyes in Japan were on the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly election, which would decide the leadership of the nation’s capital city. In the lead-up to the election, on June 22, Yahoo! Japan Corporation and Dentsu Inc. jointly launched a website for providing relevant information to visually challenged voters. Called Kikoeru Senkyo, which means “audible election” in Japanese, the website provides information on campaign promises made by election candidates, responses to a questionnaire on policies endorsed by each political party, and a news column about the election. (To visit the website, which is only available in Japanese,
please click here)
Why an election website for the visually challenged was needed
In Japan, 91.7% of visually challenged residents use the internet. To understand the text contained in websites, many visually challenged people get information from the internet via screen reader software, which reads the content aloud through a voice synthesizer. Screen readers cannot do everything, however; one weakness is the inability of such software to read images. That has led to problems in the past. For example, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications requires that each local government body use ‘image files’ in PDF format and provide information over the internet about campaign promises made by election candidates, which is an essential part of any election, but such files cannot be read by screen readers. As a result, over 110,000 seriously visually challenged people across the country have experienced difficulties in obtaining important information about elections online.
In addition, according to a survey of visually challenged voters ahead of the Tokyo election, respondents indicated dissatisfaction with the current status of obtaining election-related information, noting that despite a desire to get election news online, there were no websites that made it easy to find information about the election. Accordingly, there was a serious need for providing information about the election to visually challenged voters and correcting this disparity.
What does Yahoo!’s new website do?
To deal with the problem, Dentsu, together with Yahoo!, compiled all of the official campaign promises of election candidates into text format instead of PDF format, and made the content available via a microsite. If you look at the Kikoeru Senkyo election information website, however, it is completely dark, with no information appearing on menus or webpages. In fact, the election information is written in black lettering on a black background. That expresses the situation of visually challenged people who cannot obtain information about election candidates despite it being readily available to everyone else. As such, the website was designed for both sighted and visually challenged people with the aim of simultaneously raising awareness of the issue and offering a solution.
Sighted people who access the website will expect to see information about the candidate’s election campaign promises, but will actually experience the inconvenience of not being able to obtain the information, which is otherwise publicly available. In that way, the website was designed to imitate the situation of visually challenged voters to make people aware of that experience, and, hopefully, realise that this state of affairs represents a relatively unknown human rights issue. At the same time, even though the screen is totally dark, the website can be easily used by visually challenged people because it allows them to use screen reader software for reading aloud the content in HTML text format. In other words, by switching the places of the sighted and visually challenged users of the website, we aimed to offer a solution to and raise awareness of the inequality of access to election information online, which has been largely overlooked until recently.
Kikoeru Senkyo election information website is completely dark
When creating the website, the team at Dentsu were conscious of the need to design it to be easy to use by visually challenged users, so they incorporated ideas from relevant support groups and experts as well as visually challenged people themselves. During that process, they had them try using a mock-up of the website as they made improvements to its user interface and user experience. Along with making the website user-friendly for the visually challenged they also strove to offer a full range of content in addition to the campaign promises made by election candidates, including information about the candidates, a comparison of their campaign platforms, questionnaires on policies, and a news column about the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly election.
Results of the website campaign
The initiative led to some excellent results.
After being featured in the mass media, the problem of disparity of access to election information by visually challenged voters was widely discussed on social networking services. Surprised by the growing interest in the issue, members of the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly endorsed relevant policies discussed on the services and began addressing the need to eliminate the disparity.
Eventually, all of Japan’s major political parties reached a non-partisan consensus and promised to eliminate the disparity of access to election information by visually challenged voters, marking the first step towards solving this problem.
Most importantly, the website received over 1.2 million page views over 10 days after its launch.
Explanation of the website's purpose
Credits
Name | Title | Company |
Yoshimitsu Sawamoto | Executive Creative Director | DENTSU INC. |
Akira Suzuki | Creative Director / Planner | DENTSU INC. |
Kazuyoshi Ochi | Creative Director | DENTSU INC. |
Togo Kida | Creative Director | DENTSU INC. |
Kenta Isobe | Copywriter | DENTSU INC. |
Masanari Kakamu | Art Director | DENTSU INC. |
Ryota Mishima | Designer | BIRDMAN inc. |
Michihito Nishizaki | Account Executive | DENTSU INC. |
Yohei Takahashi | PR Planner | Dentsu Public Relations Inc. |
Kazuya Watanabe | PR Planner | Dentsu Public Relations Inc. |
Eiko Shimada | Producer | Freelance |
Takuro Ito | Director | BIRDMAN inc. |
Saki Togashi | Director | BIRDMAN inc. |
Takayuki Komatsu | Technical Director | BIRDMAN inc. |
Kazuki Nakata | Frontend Engineer | YAMA |
Masanori Nagamura | Backend Engineer | BIRDMAN inc. |
Mayumi Morioka | Researcher | BIRDMAN inc. |
Koichi Suzuki | Producer | Yahoo Japan Corporation |
Shinya Uchida | Creative director | Yahoo Japan Corporation |
Jun Watanabe | Creative director | Yahoo Japan Corporation |
Masami Goto | Engineer | Yahoo Japan Corporation |
Kazuto Kitakado | Art director | Yahoo Japan Corporation |
Kazuaki Matsumura | Planner | Yahoo Japan Corporation |
Akihiko Maeda | Planner | Yahoo Japan Corporation |
Chikasa Komazawa | Facilitator | Dialog in the dark |
Akira Hiyama | Facilitator | Dialog in the dark |
Yohei Seto | Facilitator | Dialog in the dark |
Hojin Ishii | Producer | Niban-kobo Productions Corp. |
Yoshimune Takamatsu | Producer | Niban-kobo Productions Corp. |
Satomi Inagaki | Director | Connection Inc. |
Ryo Takashima | Production Manager | Niban-kobo Productions Corp. |
Nana Arai | Production Manager | Niban-kobo Productions Corp. |
