Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC)
Human Factors and Privacy Subcommittee (HFP)*
March 16, 2007
Minutes

AGENDA

1. Administrative Updates and planning for March TGDC meeting (Allan Eustis)
2. Summary of HPF discussion items for March TGDC meeting
3. Other issues.

Attendees: Allan Eustis, David Baquis (U.S. Access Board), John Cugini, Nelson Hastings, Sharon Laskowski, Tricia Mason, Wendy Havens, Whitney Quesenbery

Administrative Updates (Allan Eustis):

  • Materials have been sent to TGDC on CDs. Public web page has been posted with information for the meeting. The plenary meeting is currently structured so that non controversial requirements material will be discussed on Day 1, leaving Day 2 open for longer, complicated discussions. Mary Saunders of NIST will be presenting on Day 2 as well - her office supervises the NVLAP effort.

Sharon Laskowski started the meeting by going through her slides being presented at the plenary meeting. Basically the presentation is going to be a progress report, discussing changes or issues in the HFP sections, issues requiring further analysis, usability benchmark development, and next research steps.

Basically there are three significant changes since the December meeting:

  • First is regarding availability of font sizes and contrast for all visual systems, not just for accessible voting systems. This will be removed from HFP section, and added under general requirements.
  • Second is on general, continuous adjustability, voters can switch between 3 modes: visual, audio, or visual and audio. Voter will also be able to switch between languages.
  • Third, the safety requirement now refers to UL 60950 instead of OSHA requirement.

Issues that require further analysis:

  • Voter verification and accessibility issue. This will be discussed in detail on Friday at the SI & accessibility panel. We have written a draft requirement for a starting point for discussion.
  • Vendor usability testing. We're not changing the requirement, just want to support it better. We want to add specifics for voting systems for the ISO standard being used. Sharon to add a slide on the ISO CIF.
  • Performance metrics. Sharon will discuss overall performance metrics. Status for generating these metrics will be discussed later in presentation.
  • Dexterity. Do we discuss this at meeting? Definitely. This was put into to parallel a requirement for the blind, after comments on VVSG 05. This could disqualify some EBMs.
  • End-to-end accessibility testing/evaluation. This will cover the entire election process. Vendor must document how system should work and it must be testable. We will go over our motivation for this testing. The goal is to create a place for a test method to not only look at the piece parts, but how they fit together.

Benchmarks: Sharon is still working on these slides. The general goal is to have a quantitative benchmark requirement and to achieve that we had to develop a test protocol method, determine how to count errors, and define what errors looked like. Sharon will go over that methodology and report back the data that was found. She will include a slide of the characteristics a good test instrument must have. Results being reported are supported by others doing testing that have found the same results.

Next research steps will be the last slide:

  • We want to harmonize with the EAC accepted D4D ballot guidance
  • Voter specific plain language guidance
  • Safe color guidance
  • Icons for cognizant disabilities
  • Documentation guidance
  • Accessibility performance benchmarks

NOTE: Whitney commented that the VVSG as a whole was looking great, good job to everyone involved.
Meeting adjourned at 11:50 a.m.

[* Pursuant to the Help America Vote Act of 2002, the TGDC is charged with directing NIST in performing voting systems research so that the TGDC can fulfill its role of recommending technical standards for voting equipment to the EAC. This teleconference discussion serves the purposes of the HFP subcommittee of the TGDC to direct NIST staff and coordinate its voting-related research relevant to the VVSG 2007. Discussions on this telecon are preliminary and do not necessarily reflect the views of NIST or the TGDC.]

 

 

 

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