ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY BLOG | INVENTIONS FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES

It has been a long and tough week since our power went out last week due to Hurricane Sandy. My wife and I have been staying with family members who have had their power restored which can be a little disorienting- especially when your routine has been drastically altered. The college where I teach will be closed through Tuesday and hopefully I will get back the power before that- but who knows. Sandy has been devastating to our New Jersey towns! Trees are down all of the place and power lines are mangled and  strewn about.

Being displayed in the season of the general elections is a real problem for many people and recently our Governor announced that we would be able to vote via email or fax as long as we can get the Vote by Mail Ballot to the County Clerk's Office. With this in mind I set off to download the Vote by Mail Ballot from the website which I was able to save as a PDF file. Now how would I get a good looking signature on the ballot? Actually it was quite simple, since I had brought along my Livescribe SKY Wifi Pen with me to my sister's home. Now all I needed to do was to have my wife and I sign a page in the Livescribe notebook with the Sky WiFi pen and have it automatically uploaded to Evernote. Once the syncing was done, I was able to open up the page on my Evernote account and using the Snipping tool on my laptop, I saved each signature as a JPEG file. Now I was able to go back to the ballot which was saved in a PDF format and using the Signature Tool from within Adobe Acrobat X, I was able to import the image file and use it to digitally sign the ballot. The process took me less then 5 minutes and when I was done I used my eFax account to fax the ballots to the county clerk's office. The process was very quick and straightforward. I will give you an update when I hear back from the Clerk's Office. So remember to vote this Tuesday in the General Election!