While Visio makes great diagrams and flow charts, it does not make great JPGs (or really, any other file formats other than their own VSDs.) I've struggled with needing to make PDFs from annotated JPGs created in Visio, and the resulting PDF looked grainy and blurry. After some digging on the Internets, I found a forum post made by a Microsoft employee who works on Visio, and discovered that Microsoft knows their JPG converter is terrible (even if you are saving them as 100% quality) and that the best way to get a high-quality resulting image is to save it as an EMF file. You can then paste the EMF file into Word (where it looks great), or use Word to create a PDF (also great).  Problem solved!

I am building out a mobile site on my demo image and came across the following issue – The typical resolution of a smartphone screen is 320x480 – i.e width is 320px (Most new smartphones are similar) I have created a website with the 1700 template in 15.1.3, and stripped out as much functionality as possible to make it really easy to read on a mobile. However, the 1700 template will not decrease in size below 750px - which means, when I access on my phone, it scales it down in size, making all the fonts hard to read. I thought this template was meant to be scalable for mobile. Does anyone know what I need to do to get it to have a flexible width down to 320px?

Testing and correcting accessibility problems throughout the development process is all about tools. Here are tips I've collected:

• Support the fewest back versions of JAWS you can: just as with browsers, supporting earlier versions makes development infinitely harder. Current version is 11.
• Fangs is a free screen-reader emulator, a Firefox plugin: http://www.standards-schmandards.com/projects/fangs/
• Study Juicy Studio (http://juicystudio.com/) for Javascript accessibility fixes: they've figured out tons.
• Use Juicy Studio accessibility plugins and toolbar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/user/320.
• WebAIM now has an accessibility toolbar: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6720.
• There's also a free Web Accessibility Toolbar for IE: http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/wat-ie-about.html

Finding more tools:

I came upon this site (http://gs.statcounter.com/) reading an article about Bing momentarily being ahead of Yahoo! search.  That was interesting enough, but when I checked their homepage, the statistic they lead with (and which apparently is of the most interest to visitors) is the browser share. They also have statistics on specific browser versions, operating systems, and mobile browsers.

If you work on web based UI much, and you're a standards junkie...

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Great GREAT articles there. He just recently posted http://www.alistapart.com/articles/previewofhtml5

Got me all excited about HTML 5!

This past week, I have caught up on a lot of traffic about a new book called Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits and a supporting article both by Heather McLeod Grant & Leslie R. Crutchfield. I am also working on looking at how we organize and structure iMIS moving forward for the UX Team. The article refocused some of my thoughts.

There has been a trend in the non-profit world to adopt more for-profit business practices to succeed. I have seen, as an example, more people with advanced degrees and experience in the for-profit world recruited into customer organizations. I have often wondered about the overall impact of this direction, whether over the long-term it would bear greater results or just somehow make it more mechanical, lose a little bit of the magic. I am an idealist and I want to be believe that through my work at ASI, I am affecting social change and having an impact on the greater good, regardless of how small or indirect. It’s one of the main reasons I work here. I guess, like most relationships, there are benefits to both the non-profit and for-profit sectors from these trends.

Always a stickler for UI patterns and consistency, I’ve found another pattern that seems to be repeating a lot…

An object that has a title, a description and optionally a Thumbnail Image and (optionally again) a HighRes image.

So, I had quite a few senarios where I needed to display information that took up a whole lot of real estate, but was only needed for a short period of time. Sort of a "hover help" kinda thing. I googled it for a while, and really wanted a "pure css" solution, but after realizing how much "fussing" with it that was needed for it to actually work in IE6 (even IE7 requires a strict doctype to get the hover pseudo element to work properly on non anchor elements), I decided to just go with a JS solution.

Too good not to share: Free Usability Advice, from our friends at Expero. (See my prior blog entry.)

It's intended to provide short, general answers to broad topics about user-centered design. (They're considering adding a separate section to handle the non-usability questions, which do, of course, get submitted. Should be fun!)

This week several of us in InfoDev attended a 2-day seminar on Web Content Usability, taught by Expero, a local usability firm. Lots to say about that, but I'll start with the end, where we asked for and received a quick evaluation of usability issues with our new Helpsite. Here's what we got, in the order they were brainstormed: