This was yet another attempt on my part to get familiar with Accessibility. The term means a lot but to me it refers to usability of computer systems by people with disabilities or age related limitations. I was notified about this seminar which looked at Macromedia (formerly) Flash as a delivery tool and how one can make it accessible – Designing Accessible eLEarning Applications with Flash. The title was intriguing because I never thought one could make it accessible the way HTML/xHTML behaves and hence I decided to participate.
education
Usability Training Workshop
I have been keeping busy these days with the User Centered Analysis and Practical Usability Testing workshops at Human Factors International (HFI). The course is very extensive and I hardly get time to spend at home these days. But I am happy that I have found something which I can pursue with great passion. These training sessions are enabling me to better understand the needs and the strategies that are currently being employed to design GUIs.
The User Centric Design course is an extensive one which deals with forming design strategies. These strategies are based upon some studies and surveys which the stakeholder (owner) undertakes before he embarks upon making a full fledged website. The study of design goals and other such criteria enables to better understand the tasks and thus design a better user experience. The Practical Usability Training course deals more with formative prototype testing and interviewing the affected user groups to understand their mental models when they view specific websites. Of course, this is a very shallow explanation that I have given here for both the courses but you can visit the website for more details on training and certification.
We have a large audience this time attending both the courses from all across the country and especially from the bigger Indian IT companies. This accentuates the fact that more and more organizations have started to look at usability as a very important factor for designing web and software applications.
Usability Workshop – Day 2
The day was supposed to have been a lengthy one. Some of the outstation participants had to go early tomorrow and hence a huge chunk of the portion had to be completed today. Today’s topics were quite interesting – Writing Content for the Web, Typography, Using Web Controls, Design for Web Applications, Use of Graphics and Colours. The discussions are always conjoined with an exercise and it helps to remember things. We also take time out and review some website in conjunction with whatever is being taught currently.