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During times of national emergency, USAGov serves as the official channel of disaster communications for the federal government. To help people across the country prepare for and recover from disasters, we use different tactics across our channels.

These tips can help your organization deliver timely information to your audience during a disaster.

At vote.gov, our mission is to make it easy for all eligible voters to understand how to register and vote. That’s why we’ve partnered with the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to create a tool that helps people more easily fill out the National Mail Voter Registration Form. 

We’re celebrating the release of our new benefits experience onUSA.gov and USAGov en Español. It features a redesigned benefit finder tool, offering a more streamlined way to find government benefits for health care, housing, food, unemployment, and more.

This major update came as a result of the closing of Benefits.gov, SSABest.Benefits.gov, and GovLoans.gov. It transitions the role of the government’s one-stop shop for federal benefits information to theUSAGov program.

Ensuring USA.gov and USAGov en Español are accessible to people with disabilities is one of our top priorities. And planning for accessibility begins before we create a single piece of code. Learn how developers from our Web Operations team and specialists from our Accessibility team work closely to create an inclusive digital experience.

As we continue to develop content for USAGov’s benefit finder, we work hard to tailor the experience for our Spanish-speaking users. Rather than a straight translation from English, we transcreate Spanish language content to catch the nuances of both language and culture. The process begins with our iterative multilingual user research.

Since its launch in 2016, vote.gov has been known as a trusted source for accurate, official voting information from the U.S. government. We recently gave the site a new look with improved accessibility features and expanded information based on questions we heard from voters. And vote.gov is now available in 19 languages — covering 96% of the American public — with more on the way.

One of the USAGov program’s core focus areas is improving the benefits experience for our users. With customer experience in mind, we’re excited to share a significant change coming this fall. Benefits.gov, which has been hosted by the Department of Labor since 2002, will be sunsetting at the end of September, and we're creating a new benefits experience on USA.gov and USAGov en Español.

It can be challenging for federal programs to recruit people to participate in user research. They need to follow the privacy and security regulations and paperwork reduction laws designed to protect the public, but that adds time and complexity to the process. And it can lead to teams doing less user research with the people their websites serve.

To create a solution to this challenge, USAGov and the 10x program, both part of GSA’s Technology Transformation Services (TTS), partnered to develop a user research recruitment page at usa.gov/user-research.

The Public Experience Portfolio's User Experience (UX) team consistently conducts research to evaluate various aspects of the program. We generally try to recruit a broad audience but also use a prequalification process to ensure diversity. Despite these efforts, we found we weren’t reaching the disability community as thoroughly as we would like. We decided to conduct a dedicated study with individuals who use assistive technology to access USA.gov.

Federal laws protect voting rights for people with disabilities, but many people with disabilities experience barriers to voting, leading to lower voting rates. 

After the November 2022 midterm elections, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) estimated that if voters with disabilities had voted at the same rates as voters without disabilities, there would be around 2 million more votes cast. The EAC also found that people with disabilities voted at a 3.6 percent lower rate than people without disabilities, though that number narrowed to 1.5 percent after being adjusted with updated Census data. 

Accessibility matters both in person and online. As an official government source of voting information, vote.gov helps voters with disabilities know that their voting rights are protected by law. And it makes them aware of accommodations available to help them register and vote.