According to the WHO, approximately 15% of the world’s aging population lives with some form of disability. Accessibility involves a wide range of disabilities, including visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, language, learning, and neurological disabilities. What can we as technical communicators do to ensure we are providing accessible help documentation and content for all our […]
Archive | Software
Information 4.0 – Making Content Intelligent
As the industrial revolution enters its fourth stage, technical communication is evolving in parallel. The challenge for technical communicators is to develop new methods of creating, managing, and storing content that are compatible with the latest delivery channels – to close the gap between the more traditional technical communication methods and the requirements that Industry […]
Enterprise Excellence 2018: A Look Ahead
We are excited to be exhibiting at Enterprise Excellence on the 23rd of May in Croke Park alongside experts in lean, Six Sigma, and continuous improvement. Building on the inaugural event in 2017, this year promises to be even better, with twice as many professionals attending to learn and interact with Ireland’s lean experts from […]
Creating Documentation with Limited Resources: Weighing Up the Outsourcing Options
Outsourcing is a valuable tool for project managers with limited resources, under pressure to deliver a user manual, training guide, or datasheet. We outline two outsourcing options for delivering high-quality documentation and identify the scenarios with which they are best matched. Resourcing Challenges You have documentation requirements that you cannot fulfil with the resources currently […]
Top Tips to Write Localisation-Friendly Source Content
High-quality documentation is not just essential for getting products ready to market and to increase sales, but also for reducing localisation costs. Localisation, the process of adapting your content to a specific market, starts with preparing the source content linguistically and functionally. To ensure global success, you must consider how the quality of your source […]
The Future of Work: Tech Talk
This week, it@cork kicked off its 2017 Tech Talk series at the brand-new Republic of Work facility in Cork city. Republic of Work CEO DC Cahalane clearly took pride in showcasing his latest venture to the local business and tech community. The facility is a well-designed co-working space that offers a host of ancillary supports […]
Technical Writers in the Development Cycle: Waterfall vs. Agile
Project team members’ grasp of the technical specifics underpinning a project management methodology can sometimes resemble a native speaker’s grasp of grammar. On the surface, it seems more than adequate, but don’t ask them to explain the present perfect continuous. Waterfall and agile (with its numerous variants, of which scrum is perhaps the most well-known) are […]
Hello World: Writing API Tutorials for Multiple Audiences
As technical writers, we understand where we fit in the world. No one wants to read the manual; they want to use the product. In fact, even that’s not true: often, users just want a certain result. This is especially the case with an application programming interface (API). External developers use an API because it […]
Strengthening the Technical Writer/SME Relationship
People outside our industry often ask how technical writers write about subjects where we have no specific expertise. The answer is that every writing project is a collaborative effort between a writer and a subject matter expert (SME). Like all products, the final documentation is only as good as the raw materials that go into it […]
The Art of Saying Less: Minimalism
Everyone is familiar with the information overload experience. Having spent your hard-earned cash on the latest product, perhaps a Smart TV, that promises to transform your life, you switch it on and are presented with a myriad of options, none of which you require. You open up the accompanying manual and groan audibly as you […]
