Monthly Meeting–September 10, 2002 The Kiss of the Spiderbot & Open Source Meets Usability

Tuesday, September 10, 2002 7:00 to 9:30 pm involved with HCI as the chair of CHI ‘97, a past editor of ❂ the SIGCHI Bulletin, and for nearly ten years a member of the executive committee of SIGCHI. He is now editor of ACM 7:00 to 7:30: Tea, Coffee, Socializing, Joining BayCHI, ... interactions. 7:30 to 9:30: The Kiss of the Spiderbot. Steven Pemberton, CWI and W3C Open Source Meets Usability & At CHI 2002, we organized a workshop and an informal SIG to discuss possible points of synergy between open source and Open Source Meets Usability. usability. We came up with several exciting agendas to pursue. Nancy Frishberg, Sun Microsystems Peter Trudelle, Netscape Since April, that group has managed to open a discussion group Communications/AOL Time Warner Scooter Morris, Genentech (with slow traffic), write a draft of an article for interactions, and PARC’s George E. Pake Auditorium continue developing and releasing open-source products. We’ll 3333 Coyote Hill Road share some of those agendas and describe other products and processes that may affect usability of open-source products. Palo Alto, CA 94304 Nancy Frishberg joined Sun Microsystems in December, 2000, BayCHI meeting attendance is free and open to the as manager of Solaris human computer interaction. She has been public. BayCHI programs are not audio- or videotaped, learning about open-source software development along with a and taping by attendees is not permitted. small team internal to Sun (distributed between Dublin, Ireland, The Kiss of the Spiderbot and the Bay Area) and, in conjunction with a slightly larger group sprinkled around the world, working on the GNOME The web is currently bedeviled with inaccessible web sites. Even desktop. A longtime BayCHI member, she was most recently a if you have good eyesight, it can be difficult, with the host of web presenter in March, 2001. sites that render their texts with tiny fonts sized in pixels. But if you have poor eyesight or are blind, it is truly a torture: Vast Peter Trudelle is a software development manager for Netscape numbers of current web sites are designed for visual use only, on Communications/AOL Time Warner. For the last four years, his fixed screen sizes, on a single platform. teams have worked with the Mozilla.org open source organiza- tion to build a toolkit for UI development, including the XUL But it doesn’t have to be like that. The new versions of HTML and XBL languages, and an obscure browser called Netscape now emerging have been designed explicitly with usability, acces- Navigator 7.0. sibility and device independence in mind, and this talk demon- strates how closely intertwined these three topics are. Scooter Morris is principal systems architect with Genentech. He brings the perspective of the user community, which has But there’s more. There’s a blind billionaire user out there, with embraced open source software in a technology-intensive busi- millions of friends who listen to his every word, who’s going to ness other than IT. make web site builders realize that there is also an economic rea- son for making web sites accessible and usable for all ... More detailed bios will be available soon on the BayCHI web site. Steven Pemberton is a researcher at CWI, the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science in Have an idea for a program topic or speaker? Contact BayCHI Amsterdam. He has been involved with the web since the begin- Program Chair Richard Anderson at [email protected] or ning, organizing two workshops at the first web conference. He (415) 383-5689. is the chair of the Consortium’s HTML and Forms working groups, designing the next-generation markup for the web, and was one of the authors of CSS. But he is also

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