Gerry McGovern brings up a provocative thought in his February 5th issue of his New Thinking Newsletter. The title can make many a technical communicator sit up and take notice: PDFs are evil, lazy, slothful and sinful! We’re back to the basic question here: what are you trying to communicate? I think Gerry McGovern has a point when he says the customer already knows about your company and looks for more information about something specific, not a repeat of the company’s message. It would be disappointing to go to the trouble of downloading the document and finding that the majority of the material I printed out did not cover the topic I was researching. However, you don’t know where that document will end up. Does it get downloaded to be read on the train? Does the document change hands many times? At some point, the connection to your company might…
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Have you ever had trouble trying to code accessible tables on your Web site? I could never remember the codes myself. I always needed to have Mike Paciello‘s book, Web Accessibility for People with Disabilities opened up to the pages with all the codes for making accessible tables. Now Frank Palinkas has made a practical tool for anyone who is trying to learn how to code accessible tables. In the Fast Track Tutorials section, there is a tutorial called Creating Accessible Tabular Data Tables. One nice advantage is that you can simply copy the code from his tutorial and paste it into your HTML editor to prepare the correct code. (Paste it into the code-view.) If you are brand new to standards and accessibility and wonder what accessible tables are, then Frank’s tutorial is definitely for you. He made the tutorial as a demonstration of web standards and accessibility methods…
2 CommentsNetworking. Professional development. Friends. That’s what you get from a membership in an appropriate professional organization, says Les Potter. I agree. Les talks about the value he got/gets from IABC, which I first learned about in October, when I attended the Region 2 conference run by STC UK. Silvia Cambié from IABC Europe and Middle East was one of the speakers. I regretted not hearing her talk, but it was one of those usual conflicts – two sessions you want to hear being held at the same time, so I tossed a virtual coin. At least I heard her on a panel discussion about the future of technical communication. The conference theme was the business value of technical communicators, and Silvia argued that they should sit “at the table” participating in business strategies. The entire conference was excellent, and filled with discussions along that theme. As a member of STC,…
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