EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | Hank Dietz
Organization : | University of Kentucky
Post Date : | 9/29/2005
Section Comments
Section : | 3.2.6.2.1
Page no. : | 3-18
Line no.: |
Comment : | A delay of 3 seconds is not "without perceptible delay". Computer users seeing no response for 3 seconds will generally assume that their input was missed and re-enter the choice, etc., which could cause erratic behavior for a slow DRE. In the computing field in general, between 1/10 and 1/100 second is considered "without perceptible delay" with respect to acting upon human input. It is possible that some actions performed by a DRE inherently must take longer than 1/10 second (e.g., printing or writing to a CD-R), so specifying a maximum 3 second period before the DRE is ready to accept new input could be appropriate, but there must be a response in less than a second. If the action cannot be fully processed in less than a second, the system must still respond in less than a second with a "busy" or "working" indicator -- such as displaying the classic hourglass cursor -- so that the user immediately knows the input has been seen. Thus, 3 seconds might be acceptable as the maximum allowable time before an operation is complete and new input can be accepted, but additionally require that acceptance and processing of user input shall be indicated within 1 second (or even 1/10 second).