Derek Featherstone is a well known instructor, speaker and developer with expertise in web accessibility consulting.

Derek delivers technical training that is engaging, informative and immediately applicable. A high-quality instructor, he draws on his background as a former high school teacher plus seven years running his web development and accessibility consultancy Further Ahead, based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

His experience includes hands-on development, web accessibility consulting and training. He advises many government agencies, educational institutions and private sector companies providing them with expert accessibility testing and review and recommendations for improving the accessibility of their web sites to all people.

Louis Rosenfeld is founder of Rosenfeld Media, a new publishing house focused on short, practical books on user experience design. As an information architecture consultant, he has helped numerous Fortune 500s and other large, messy, political enterprises make their information easier to find. Lou is co-author of “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web”
(O¹Reilly & Associates; 3rd edition, 2006), and has been a regular contributor to Web Review, Internet World, and CIO magazines. Lou is co-founder of the Information Architecture Institute and UXnet, the User Experience Network. He blogs regularly at www.louisrosenfeld.com.

Gene has worked on the web for 10 years, including five years planning, developing and managing large-scale websites.

From 1999 to 2003 he managed the Alberta Government website and planned a major redesign of that site. Gene also led the web team at Capital Health, improving the effectiveness of the website and Intranet for that organization’s 20,000 employees and 1 million users.

As a consultant Gene has advised Comcast, Ancestry.com, the Canadian Patient Safety Institute, the Alberta Government and other clients on interface design, information architecture, website planning and management, and interactive strategy.

You’ll find some of his ideas on tagging and pageless interactions in books like Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 3rd Edition and Ambient Findability.

Since 1997 Jess has focused his career on understanding and developing positive user experiences for his clients and their users. Jess draws on techniques from usability, information architecture, and user research to generate client insight to drive innovation and create better customer experiences. His value-centered approach grounds customer experience strategy at the intersection of business goals and customer goals to produce return on investment for clients, and ‘return on experience’ for their customers.

Jess regularly writes and speaks at conferences about user experience. He has contributed ideas and material for several user experience books, including Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd Ed.; Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience and Peter van Dijck’s Information Architecture for Designers. His work appears as a case study in Designing Websites for Every Audience by Ilise Benun.