Are you a developer or designer of software (standalone or web based) and would like to develop a product to enable as many people to effectively use it successfully?
To assist in increasing customer satisfaction do you develop your product to be as usable and accessible as possible? Do you follow and conform to such guidelines as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1) and the Revised Section 508 standards and Section 255 of the Communications Act?
You may also follow up by performing the necessary automated and manual accessibility evaluations enabling you to review the results of the evaluation reports and correct anything before going live. Since all accessibility evaluation reports you received were positive you felt comfortable everything was addressed to help insure your product was as accessible as possible. To help assure all users would be able to read your documentation you followed procedures on how to make your user documentation accessible such as the procedures in Make Your Word Documents Accessible - Office Support and Create and Verify PDF Accessibility - Adobe.
Since software may have many options and screens to interact with it and operate all controls, a clear, concise and accurate user documentation is required to learn the product. Also it may have a user interface that is not intuitive to a new user. Because of this complexity without clear and correct user documentation a new user may not be able to teach themselves all aspects of the product, preventing them from using the software.
After all of the careful planning and your software product went live you received some feedback from a customer stating they could not use the software with a screen reader (assistive technology). Receiving such a comment made you wonder what you may have missed in your vigilant plan to launch an accessible software product. Could it be the user documentation?
Although I talk a little bit about usability for software this blog post focuses on documentation.
A Few Tips to Assist in Developing More Usable User Documentation:
- Follow all vendors’ procedures that describe how to develop accessible documents using the application used to develop the document.
- Insure the user documentation uses the exact words that are in the software user interface.
- Use the correct terminology for each user interface element contained in the software so it matches the documentation since some assistive technology like screen readers read these controls. A few examples are drop down menu, hyperlink, and button and...
- Do not use orientation words in the documentation such as “refer to the upper left-hand corner of the screen”. Screen reader users who are blind cannot easily reference within an application using spatial references with no text or user control element landmarks.
- Do not rely on color alone when providing guidance. Describe the text user interface controls in detail. A poor example is “Click on the red image”.
- After every software modification update the user documentation if the update changes the user interface or landmark words you used in the past versions.
- Not all users use a mouse therefore include all equivalent short cut keystrokes to perform all mouse tasks.
- If alt attributes (alternative text) were used to specify an alternate text for images in the software, be sure the text that was used for the alt attribute matches the user documentation. This is especially important if an alt attribute happens to be on a user control.
- Perform automated accessibility evaluations and manual evaluations following well designed scripts by people with disabilities who use a wide range of assistive technology.
- Get feedback from people with disabilities who use a wide range of assistive technology.
- Lastly, it is possible the software is accessible. However, without accurate and complete user documentation a user who uses assistive technology could get lost attempting to learn a new non-intuitive software product without accurate documentation designed for all users.
Although my short list is not inclusive, if one thinks about these tips they may assist in developing more usable and accessible user documentation. This will help users who use assistive technology to use the software effectively.
Since I am completely blind, use a screen reader plus have many years of experience in accessibility, often people ask my opinion on accessibility. When a person asks me if a certain software application I have used is accessible sometimes I'm reluctant to answer because I do not have enough information to tell if it is accessible. This may be because I do not know how to use the software well enough since the user interface is complicated and not intuitive allowing me to learn without accurate user documentation. In these instances the user documentation may be the problem and not the software unless I immediately find obvious accessibility issues which even excellent user documentation cannot overcome.
When developing software it is extremely beneficial to incorporate accessibility in the design and developmental phase due to the expense of going back and retrofitting accessibility after it is developed and launched to the public. Plus, if it is launched with accessibility issues a developer may receive negative customer feedback which impacts customer relations. Developing accurate, accessible and usable user documentation is critical in completing the accessibility experience.
If you develop accurate and accessible documentation it may also help you from receiving comments regarding users stating they cannot use the software due to accessibility issues when the issue could be with the user documentation and not with the software. As I stated in my introduction to this topic this could have been the case why a screen reader user reported an accessibility issue preventing them from using the software just after the product went live.
Do you have any tips to help develop more accurate and usable user documentation? Would you like to share any success stories? Any other thoughts that come to mind that may help our conversation after reading this?
We all look forward to hearing your valuable thoughts and comments.
Bill Tipton
Contributing Author,
Global Dialogue Center
http://www.globaldialoguecenter.com/
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/wdtipton
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bill.tipton.39
Twitter: http://twitter.com/wdtipton