Karen Mardahl, Technical Writer at G.R.A.S. Sound & Vibration, Denmark
Twitter: @kmdk Website: mardahl.dk
“Where do I start?” This is one of the first questions I hear when discussing accessibility for technical communicators. I shared my suggestions in an Adobe eSeminar with Tom Aldous, the Adobe Technical Communication Suite Product Evangelist. This article is a collection of the links from the eSeminar.
Read this article with the definition of disability from the World Health Organization in mind (WHO).
[WHO] acknowledges that every human being can experience a decrement in health and thereby experience some degree of disability. Disability is not something that only happens to a minority of humanity. The ICF thus ‘mainstreams’ the experience of disability and recognises it as a universal human experience.
- from the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF)
If disability is a universal human experience, why aren’t we all thinking accessibility in all our communication?
Start with your writing
Content is at the root of all we do, so that is a logical place to implement accessibility immediately. All it takes is plain language. Unfamiliar with the concept? The links, including Nordic resources, will explain it.
The Design To Read site is a good place to understand the value of the words you choose.
Plain language resources are
The EU has produced an excellent little booklet called How to Write Clearly in 23 languages! You can download a free PDF of the booklet from the“How to Write Clearly” page in the EU bookshop. In case that link changes over time, just search for the EU bookshop on the page for EU translations and drafting resources.
While we’re on the topic of the EU resources, note these EU resources on accessibility.
Next Up is Alt Text
The next easy-to-start step is alt text, or alternate text. This is text that is used “in place of” an image. You can see this text when a large image is loading on a webpage. If you can’t see, your screen reader reads it for you. So simple, and yet so many forget or ignore this step in writing content. I won’t explain more because the WebAIM page on alt text says it all. Memorize it!
Steve Faulkner of The Paciello Group is working on HTML5: Techniques for providing useful text alternatives. It is a valuable companion to the WebAIM article.
Accessible PDFs
Making accessible PDFs is a natural extension of the PDF work many technical communicators already do. Download my presentation on techcomms and inclusion from the TCUK 2010 conference to read the slide notes explaining this process. The notes include more useful references.
Captions and Transcripts
That presentation I just mentioned also contains information about adding captions and doing transcripts.
I cannot emphasize enough how important captions or transcripts are for truly including all members of your technical communication audience. The transcript for my own recent eSeminar with Adobe on accessibility and technical communication is not yet ready, but I will tweet the availability when it is.
Communities
Don’t feel lonely in your quest for knowledge. There are communities out there full of awesome helpfulness and knowledge. Sign up for the discussion list at WebAIM to start learning today! You can also start following this Twitter list of great accessibility resources. I started following many of these people when I opened the @stcaccess Twitter account in late 2008. I credit them for much of what I know today.
Education and Standards
Even though you can go far on your own, structured training can give you more focus.
The Accessibility for Web Writers series at 4 Syllables from Australia gives you the fastest education. It goes into depth about many of the issues I raise in this article and in the eSeminar.
My favourite recommendation is the book Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design by Shawn Lawton Henry. It’s available in print, too, but being freely available online makes the information truly accessible to all.
The newsletter from University of Minnesota in Duluth is an education unto itself. It’s one way to get digestible morsels each week on topics like typography, information architecture, usability, and of course, accessibility. It is maintained by @laura_carlson, an incredibly knowledgeable person worth following on Twitter.
Depending on your level of geek, try the Opera Web Standards Curriculum in association with Yahoo! Developer Network for structured training, or the Web Standards Project’s InterACT website. I have heard good reviews of the book they have produced.
Speaking of standards, you’ll need to know about the necessary standards from the W3C. They live at the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) site. If you work with software products, you must know the Web Content Accessibility Standards. Every writer should know the Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines. Throughout the WAI site, there are educational documents to help both writers and developers.
If you are working with the UK, you will want to investigate the Web Accessibility Code of Practice BS8878 for your business. It costs money, but some businesses may require it.
In connection with the BS8878 standards, Sandi Wassmer, a member of the UK’s eAccessibility Forum, wrote up 10 principles for guiding your work with accessibility.
- Be equitable
- Be flexible
- Be simple and intuitive
- Be perceptible
- Be informative
- Be preventative
- Be tolerant
- Be effortless
- Be accommodating
- Be consistent
Read the reasoning behind these points on the Copious website and .Net magazine’s article. Then, place these 10 principles somewhere as a daily reminder of what you want to achieve with your acccessible technical communication projects.
Words to Ponder
Learn more about the information I present here by watching the eSeminar – Accessibility in the World of Technical Communication.
I’ll leave you to think about this excellent statement that applies fully to technical communication.
When universal design processes fail to include, consult with, and listen to the people we are actually designing for, we also fail to design effectively.
– from Lisa Herrod
Why ReadSoft Chose to Publish AIRHelp
ReadSoft is headquartered in Helsingborg, Sweden. Jason Nichols is Technical Writer and Trainer at ReadSoft.
Twitter: @jasonanichols Web www.jasonanichols.net
Publishing to Adobe AIRHelp by Jason Nichols
A few years ago our Technical Communication team upgraded to Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite 2. One of the reasons why we decided to get TCS2 was the ability of RoboHelp 8 to output to Adobe AIR—at the time a brand new publishing platform. (And not just for technical documentation, but any application. TweetDeck is perhaps the most famous example.)
There are a few reasons why we publish to Adobe AIR, which I’d like to explain below.
Modern look and feel
Technical documents have moved a long way from the days of WinHelp and Compiled Help (CHM files). The first thing that strikes you when looking at AIRHelp is that it’s modern:
An Example of Adobe AIRHelp
Documents that sell
Technical documents also market your organisation, in the same way a website does. An old website built on old technology with outdated colour schemes is going to have a negative effect on visitors. If I was a potential customer browsing the documentation, and it looked outdated, I would definitely think the company was old-school. I would lean more favourably toward the organisation that looked modern.
So this is a general tip for all you tech writers out there: Irrespective of what output(s) you produce, spend some time making it look cutting edge (at best) or up-to-date (at least).
Online/offline modes
AIRHelp can act as a web browser and display content not contained in the original AIR file, but rather content on a web server. Our content is updated continuously, between product releases. (This is because there is always so much to document!) A major product release may be the current one for a whole year, but fixes and service packs are always released in between. In this typical software release schedule, it obviously makes sense to be able to update and improve the documentation at the same time. Or, better, anytime!
We host our Help content on a web server as well, as HTML pages (also generated from RoboHelp). This week I updated several topics in a guide and added a few extra ones. I then generated the Help and published the new HTML output to the web server. And anyone with the AIRHelp installed and an Internet connection will see the new content without having to do anything.
The benefits for consultants
Being online though can sometimes be a luxury. Our consultants—those that perform installations and configuration—often don’t have Internet access when they are on a customer’s site. But they still need the documentation. So they take the AIRHelp with them on their laptops. When they come back to the office, the content can be updated.
This is a much better solution than PDFs. PDFs cannot be updated. They are static, passive. One of the big problems we had is that a lot of our consultants were walking around with documentation that was literally years old. They have heavy workloads and I can imagine they don’t have the time to check for new versions. But as a result we always had technical and support questions about various issues that they could not find the answer to in the documentation because it was an old version.
Whither printed documentation?
We’re really trying to push PDFs into the background and to get people to use AIRHelp and our HTML pages instead. It takes a lot of time to publish a document for print purposes. I mean, we use RoboHelp to generate Word documents and macros to apply final formatting and create the PDF. But a significant amount of time is taken with fixing small formatting issues. This is the nature of printed documentation—each page has to look right. And in our case (and not just for us) people rarely print out an entire guide. They just want to browse the contents and look for a particular piece of information.
Commenting function
AIRHelp gives readers the ability to add their own comments to a topic. We’ve used this for peer reviews. However, we use RoboHelp 8 and the ability to administer comments (view, edit, delete) is limited. I’ve heard this has been improved in RoboHelp 9 but I haven’t yet looked at it.
Conclusion
In summary, we use AIRHelp because of its modern look and feel, it’s ease to push out updates, and because it has an offline mode which is a must-have for our consultants.
To learn more about ReadSoft’s implementation of AIRHelp, read an interview with Jason.