World Usability Day

Did you know that today was World Usability Day? No? Neither did I until an email landed in my inbox from Userfocus, a UK-based usability/accessibility consultancy.

There's a one-day event held in Nottingham today, with lots of interesting speakers. But I'm particularly gutted to be missing the talk entitled:

“What Farmer Buckley's exploding trousers can tell us about web usability”, by Dave Travis of Userfocus Ltd, (211 Piccadilly London W1J 9HF)

What, indeed?

I'd love to hear from anyone who attended, and might be able to shed some light on Farmer Buckley's mishap!

Podcasts - Usability & Accessibility

Roger Kondrat over at TechWinter has two excellent Podcasts about usability and accessibility - two areas of particular interest to me.

To listen to the podcasts, go directly to Roger's blog:

#1: What is Usability and what does it mean to me? - a discussion with Lisa Halabi, Head of Usability at WebCredible.

#2: What is Accessibility and what does it mean to me? - a discussion with Trenton Moss, Head of Accessibility at WebCredible

They both make excellent points, and give sensible advice for those wishing to convince clients or superiours of the value of good usability and accessible sites.

It amazes me that, with so many positive benefits to using semantic XHTML and CSS, (not least the "freebie" benefit of much better SEO for your site), some company'sdesign mindsets are still rooted in tables and inline code soup.