News

Trace Center Director Gregg Vanderheiden will chair a panel that will be discussing usability and accessibility standards to ensure the successful utilization of advanced technology by all members of society. This panel is a special program at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society on Oct. 17, 2006, in San Francisco.

The panel, scheduled for 1:30 – 3:00 PM at the San Francisco Hilton, features a review of the current status, issues, and strategies for accessibility and usability standards for interactive software and medical devices. Panelists include experts who represent both industry and academia in national and international standards efforts, including Gregg Vanderheiden, Daryle Gardner-Bonneau (Michigan State University), Aaron Bangor (AT&T Labs), and Molly Follette Story (Univ. of California-Berkeley).

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society is the U.S. Technical Advisory Group to ISO for ergonomics standards. In the past few years, a long-standing effort within HFES to promote human factors/ergonomics standards for software at the national and international levels resulted in the publication of a canvass draft for a software ergonomics standard, HFES 200 (Human Factors Engineering of Software User Interfaces).

The Trace Center contributed to the development of HFES 200.2, and Center Director Gregg Vanderheiden serves as co-editor of HFES 200.2. Funding for Trace’s work on this and other standards has been provided by the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, U.S. Department of Education, under grant #H133E030012 (RERC on Universal Interface and Information Technology Access).