Accessibility is not only for people with disabilities

Accessibility is in the news again: Harvard and M.I.T. Are Sued Over Lack of Closed Captions “Advocates for the deaf on Thursday filed federal lawsuits against Harvard and M.I.T., saying both universities violated antidiscrimination laws by failing to provide closed captioning in their online lectures, courses, podcasts and other educational materials.” “Much of Harvard’s online content… Read more »

A help system with 3 million readers, 800K edits and 3K comments

At this moment, Autodesk’s Web based Help system statistics stand at: 3,166,604 visitors (since 1 Feb 2011) 31,268 registered users 388,517 pages 4914 videos 3,282 comments 815,966 page edits 2,333,219 all contributions More at  Irregular Enterprise Would you like your Help system achieve similar results?

How to build a multi-million dollar business by putting manuals on the Web

One of the issues we’ve been promoting for many years is the importance for Technical Authors to publish their user guides and online Help on the Web. A surprisingly large amount of companies still don’t offer Web versions, for reasons that include: It’s too difficult Our competitors might read it and reverse-engineer our product Support/Training/Marketing… Read more »

Workflowy Help by email

Workflowy is a one-list-to-rule-them-all organization tool that takes an unusual approach to providing User Assistance. Like with many other Web applications, the site contains a “how-to” video and a list of keyboard shortcuts. However, it also sends users an email that’s essentially the information you’d expect to find in a user guide or online Help file:… Read more »

Case Study: User Documentation at Red Gate Software

Our latest interview is between Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf and Rachel Potts of Red Gate Software, concerning user assistance and documentation at Red Gate Software. We discussed working in an Agile environment, providing a single support centre for all user information and how Web Analytics can help improve user documentation. This is the full interview, and… Read more »