For my own benefit, I'm writing this quick list of goodies and action items from the notes that I jotted down from the Software User Assistance conference this week:
- Remember "pave the cowpaths" — let users develop footpaths and use those to decide where to put pavers.
- Seek out books from the Visual Quick Start and Missing Manual series.
- Study CSS3 selector syntax for controlling subordinate elements:
- td p { } = styles only paragraphs within table cells
- ol > li { } = styles only items within numbered lists
- h1 +h2 { } = styles only Heading 2s that immediately follow Heading 1
- Study CSS3 for methods to add @content, without JavaScript.
- Breaking news of MadCap buying Doc-To-Help = evidence of client-side tool shakeout.
- Visit Neospeech to hear surprisingly natural text-to-speech, available in Adobe Captivate.
- Remember elearning rule-of-thumb: accessibility compliance adds 30% to dev costs; use Captivate with all accessibility options enabled.
- Research says: Yes, use narration, but make sure that it doesn't read the slides! Distracts.
- Simplify demo recording by doing voice over existing visual or visual with existing voice. Stand and smile, for best results.
- Use variables to swap out generic verbs (select, scroll, move) with device-relevant ones (tap...).
- Use onfocus events to drive dynamic embedded help: onfocus="readxml('objectname')".
- Use 1-per-topic unique elements, such as DITA's short description, as a handy place to source and extract embedded help text.
- Consider putting embedded help strings in minimal XML files, but be sure to convert any HTML tags.
- Look up CanIUse to quickly find out what CSS3 is supported, where.
- Use Dave Gash's webfonts page for samples, links.
- Take the easy path to @font-face when possible by using Google fonts with big families.
- For non-Google web fonts, let FontSquirrel generate the needed CSS3.
- Turn to HTML5rocks for terrific tutorials.
- Follow Don Day's progress with the ExpeDITA Framework, for making DITA web-CMS-friendly.