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Speaker Presentations from Prior Meetings
Karl Groves, SSB BART Group, an expert in web site accessibility, spoke on "Accessibility Audit Methods" on May 21, 2008. The presentation focused on the strengths and weaknesses of various techniques and discuss the development of a methodology which is accurate, reliable, and repeatable. His presentation is available in Powerpoint

Dr. Salvatore Schipani of NIST discussed, "Maze Hypothesis Development in Assessing Robot Performance During Teleoperation," on January 22, 2008. His presentation is available in PowerPoint and Adobe Acrobat (pdf) formats; note that both files are large -- the PowerPoint file is 76 meg, and PDF file is 19 meg. A paper describing his work also is available.

The 2007 APA Divison 21 & Division 19, and HFES Potomac Chapter Annual Symposium on Applied Experimental Research was held at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, on March 1-2, 2007; the Symposium title was A New Collaborative Frontier: Innovative Approaches and Applications; a review of the symposium written by our own Jerry Krueger was published in the April issue of the HFES Bulletin; click here for a copy of the agenda/program.

Dr. Sharla P. Rausch's (Director, Human Factors Division, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Directorate) presentation from March 1, 2007, titled "Human Factors at the Department of Homeland Security: Know our enemies; understand ourselves; put the human in the equation" is now available

On February 21, 2007, Potomac Chapter members and others interested in usability issues met in Bethesda to hear Dr. Sharon Laskowski talk about "Developing Standards for the Usability and Accessibility of Voting Systems." In brief, Dr. Laskowski outlined how the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) assigns the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) a key technical role in assisting with nationwide improvements for voting systems. As part of that role, NIST provides research support to the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) established by HAVA to develop voluntary voting system guidelines which are then delivered to the Election Assistance Commission. Dr. Laskowski described NIST’s research on equipment standards and performance benchmarks for improving the usability and accessibility of voting systems.

On January 23, 2007, nearly forty chapter members and others interested in usability issues filled the Wine Room at Positano in Bethesda to hear Dr. Deborah J. Mayhew talk about "The Business Case for Usability Engineering." Dr. Mayhew urged that usability engineers must learn to present effective business cases to management in order to win funding and support for usability work and to promote the discipline in their organizations. Her presentation made a general case for usability engineering by providing a detailed set of after-the-fact statistics and anecdotes calculating the actual bottom-line value of the usability efforts of a variety of organizations. She then provided a high level framework for planning usability engineering efforts, and a framework for estimating the return-on-investment (ROI) of specific usability engineering plans for specific development projects. In short, this talk helped practitioners become more able to make effective business cases to management for investing in usability engineering. You can view Deborah's presentation here (pdf document).

Did you miss Ben Shneiderman's talk on Creativity Support Tools: A Grand Challenge on October 18, 2006? If so, you can read a summary of his talk.