Gridlines

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has released the working draft dated 24 November 2008 of the Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG 2.0). Because it is a working draft, it does not succeed ATAG 1.0.

This working draft specifies the guidelines for authoring tools that want to be more accessible and includes several changes to ATAG 1.0. “An authoring tool that conforms to these guidelines will promote accessibility by providing an accessible user interface to authors with disabilities as well as enabling, supporting, and promoting the production of accessible Web content by all authors.” Their definition of “authoring tool” includes those that are used to edit HTML (such as Dreamweaver or Notepad) and those that are used to publish to HTML (such as Microsoft Word), in addition to the authoring tools listed on HAT-Matrix.com, plus more (such as whiteboards and chat programs).

Comments on this draft are due by 6 January 2009.

The HAT-Matrix Conference Calendar has been updated and now includes:

• Intelligent Content 2009 (next January in Palm Springs, CA)
• Web Content 2009 (next February in Clearwater Beach, FL)
• SXSW (next March in Austin, TX)
• DocTrain West (next March in Palm Springs, CA)
• WritersUA (next March/April in Seattle, WA)
• STC’s Technical Communication Summit (next May in Atlanta, GA)

Let us know if there are any others that should be added!

Have you visited the ComponentOne website lately? They’ve been busy working on three different products, all available now:

• Doc-To-Help 2009. The latest release includes an XML-based editor, intuitive interface. industry-standard code, and style editor. And Visual Studio users can take advantage of DynamicHelp, which uses drag-and-drop to add a Help pane to the application interface. You definitely need to take a look at this if you are creating embedded Help.
• DemoWorks 2009. Create videos in WMV, Flash, animated GIF, executables, and more.
• FrontLine 2008. Do you need to create a Knowledge Base for your users? Check out FrontLine, which provides a searchable portal, web-based administration, and knowledge management interface. You can build your repository by creating new documents, importing existing documents, or referencing websites. (Note: IIS server is required.)

Also, when you get a chance, check out the ComponentOne blogs. Use the tag cloud at the upper right to see the appropriate entries. (Your programmers may want to check them out, too.)

We’ve just finished updating HAT-Matrix.com with the latest features added to Author-it 5.1.

Let us know if you think we missed something for Author-it 5.1 or for any other application.

If you use Twitter, follow @helpstuff, which has been set up as a broadcast account. (That is, it only sends posts relevant to Gridlines, helpstuff, and HAT-Matrix.)

If you don’t use Twitter but don’t want to miss out, go to the helpstuff Twitter page. Or you can add the RSS feed from that page to your RSS reader.

If you have any news related to Help authoring, online documentation, new tool features, and so on, feel free to send an email to Gridlines News.

Wondering when the next conference is? Or what conflicts you might run into while planning?  Gridlines now includes a Conference Calendar page (from Google) to help you plan!

Conference organizers are welcome to submit additions to the calendar by sending an email to calendar at hatmatrix.com. Your event will get added within a reasonable time frame. (And if we figure out a safe way to let people auto-add events to the calendar without opening it up to spammers, we’ll implement it!)

Technical communicators and Help authors from across the country gathered at the DocTrain East Conference in Burlington, MA, this week for sessions on DITA, simplified English, APIs and SDKs, along with tool presentations by the vendors.

The major tool announcement this week was MadCap’s DITA roadmap. Phase 1, due out in Q1 2009, will let users import and export DITA XML files. Phases 2 and 3 add more functionality, including support for the DITA schema. MadCap’s DITA support lets technical communicators create DITA XML files but saves them from having to use the DITA Toolkit to publish (transform) the output.

Author-it Software Corporation will release Author-it 5.2 in December, with support for structured authoring and DITA 1.1. Author-it was the first authoring tool to support DITA by means of custom topic templates that published DITA XML files.

Adobe demonstrated some of the new features in Acrobat 9 and, while very little could be announced, expect to see the next version of RoboHelp sometime around Q2 2009.

And with more DITA news, Robert Anderson from IBM said that DITA 1.2 is currently in review and should also be available during Q2 2009.

For more information (and to see the slide decks from the presentations), visit the DocTrain East 2008 website.

Indigo Byte Systems announces that the new version of its software help-authoring tool, Dr.Explain 3.1, is available.

Dr.Explain is the only software documentation tool that captures snapshots of live application screens and automatically recognizes and annotates all significant controls: buttons, text fields, menus, options, and others. Until version 3.1, many software developers and vendors have been using Dr.Explain to document their Windows software, HTML pages, or Flash (SWF) applications. Now, Dr.Explain 3.1 enters the Java world. Java developers can benefit from the same technology, and automatically generate professional documentation for their Java applications made with Swing components.

For more information, see their website.

In November, the HATT moderators were asked by a list member to create a survey about current authoring tools. The survey was sponsored by HAT-Matrix.com. This post makes the results available (see the links at the bottom of the post).

The survey had seven questions:

1. Where did you hear about this survey?
2. How many years of experience do you have?
3. What country do you work in?
4. Please select the authoring tool(s) that you use on a regular basis to develop content. (The next question asks what other tools you have tried that you don’t use on a regular basis.)
5. Please select the authoring tool(s) that you have tried within the last three years, but that you don’t use on a regular basis. You might have installed the trial version or maybe you changed from one tool to another.
6. What types of content do you create?
7. What types of output do you publish?

While looking at the results, I quickly identified some things to remember for the future:

• When asking people where they heard about the survey, it would be good to include some pre-defined options. For example, the list includes “HATT”, “HATT list”, “HATT Yahoo group”, “HATT digest”, “HATT mailing list”…you get the idea. It’s going to be tough to aggregate this information (not impossible, just tougher than it needed to be). (There are 295 individual entries.)
• More information needed to be provided for question 6 (What types of content do you create?). Several people added “online Help” (or some variation thereof) under Other in question 6. However, what I needed to clarify was that “online Help” wasn’t included because it is a delivery mechanism…it’s not a type of content.
• More information needed to be provided for question 7 (What types of output do you publish?). First, I’m going to ignore my goof in omitting Microsoft Word (no, I don’t know why I left it off!) and just apologize. (Everyone who took the survey managed to work around that omission…thanks!) But at least two of the labels should have used: “HTML Help (.chm)” and “HTML-based Help (sometimes named, like WebHelp)”.

As I watched the data accumulate, I was impressed by several things:

• Folks from 23 countries took the survey.
• The news about the survey was spread through emails, lists, blogs, and more. (I think we need a better mechanism for letting people know about these surveys, though.)
• Trial versions (at least, I’m assuming they were trial versions) are used a lot. (I’m thinking that a survey about trial versions might point out some interesting information. Let me know what you think.)
• “How-to (User)” placed first in the “types of content” question (raise your hand if you’re surprised). The other content types rounding out the top five were installation guides, reference guides, release notes, and training materials.
• The most impressive thing I saw? The top four types of output that are published are PDF for online access (72.9%), HTML Help (53.85%), Microsoft Word (48.08%), and black-and-white printed manuals (40.73%). (If you add the different types of PDF together, it far outranks the others.) Note that these aren’t the final percentages…as I mentioned above, “other” options included “.chm”, for example. The numbers will go up when you do the math.

It just amazes me that in the days of Web 2.0, PDF is still the most-published output.

OK, so what results are we making available? All of them. SurveyGizmo provides reports in PDF, Word, and Excel formats. However, the PDF has some issues…the list of countries is cropped and the graph legends overwrite each other. And the Word file drops the graphs completely (and badly formats the Countries table). The files that you can download are the raw data. (Disclaimer: the file at the “Authoring Survey Results (DOC) (reformatted)” has been…well…reformatted. No other changes were made.)

Now it’s up to you :-) I figure that these results are going to get spun…that’s the concept behind non-scientific surveys like this one. By providing the raw data, you can make your own decisions.

Enjoy :-) Feel free to leave comments and suggest future survey ideas!

Files:

• Authoring Survey Results (PDF)
• Authoring Survey Results (XLS)
• Authoring Survey Results (DOC) (reformatted)
• Authoring Survey Results (DOC)