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If I could walk that WAI I wouldn't need the guidelines
Since the Understanding document ['Understanding WCAG 2.0'] is more than double the size of what it purports to explain, this itself may indicate a problem with WCAG 2.
Is it just me, or is an exposition of something often longer than what it's explaining? Particularly (one might even argue necessarily) when you're translating from technical specifications into more generally-accessible language, i.e. from high to low information density?
Is it just me, or is an exposition of something often longer than what it's explaining? Particularly (one might even argue necessarily) when you're translating from technical specifications into more generally-accessible language, i.e. from high to low information density?
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I definitely agree that working things out can lead to greater knowledge. But when the questions are things like "Where is the documentation for X? I have already looked in the following sensible places...", half an hour of fruitless searching through outdated documents on the company X: drive isn't going to teach you anything except that the documentation isn't well-publicised/well-linked/well-presented.
I find it's generally a question of working out what I need to know and how I can best find it out, and -- if some stages of that finding-out involve asking questions of other people -- making it clear to the people I'm asking that I have already checked the obvious places and done the background learning required to make their answer useful. Targeted questions, that the people in the know can answer quickly and painlessly. And if the person answering the question can tell me how to find out the answer, in a way that I can learn from or generalise from, then so much the better.
Also, if you're getting your time wasted by "people asking endless streams of trivial questions", then I'd venture to suggest that you need to manage your time (or your conceptual in-tray) better. Ach, you know all this stuff: don't drop everything to reply to each email that comes in, have templated replies for dealing with the FAQs, switch the phone through to voicemail if you need to carve out some time when you won't be interrupted, etc., etc.
And if enough people are asking me the same 'obvious' questions over and over, then I find it's worth considering (not agonising over, just re-examining the question) whether either a) the answer isn't as obvious as I think it is, or b) it isn't clear who people should be asking or where they should be looking; and maybe I need to think about ways of pushing that knowledge out more proactively to the people who need it. If the one person who knows the answer can communicate it to all the people who need to know it, then less time overall is wasted than if either that person answers the same question n times, or if n people work it out the hard way for themselves.
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Targetted questions are worse in some ways - if I want to do X, and ask someone a very specific question they can quickly answer, tomorrow I'm going to want to do XY, which is incredibly similar to X. If I'd spent more time doing research I'd probably know the answer already, but if I just found out about X, I'm going to have to go back and ask another question.
Most of the time management advice doesn't apply to people who come and talk to you, which is the main method of communication I have with people asking questions.
And I think people waste their own time - I think an awful lot of people who ask others how to do things would ACHIEVE THEIR OWN GOALS FASTER if they "worked it out the hard way". I vary myself in how much I do research and how much I ask people how to do it, and I almost always seem to be more productive when I do more research.
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Yeeess. How much use is that, really, unless you're the person with ability/responsibility to update (or mandate the update of) the documentation?
and how to find things
But I already know how to find things! :-) Generally if I can't find it in half an hour's searching, I'd be willing to bet money that it either isn't there or I'm missing some key piece of information that I don't know enough about to know how to find it. Is it really better use of people's-time-in-general for me to spend a long time bashing my head against a bootstrapping problem with the searching, when somebody else could answer the question in two seconds? (NB, I don't tend to ask phone/face-to-face questions. I figure if I email somebody with a question, they can answer it in their own time.)
Most of the time management advice doesn't apply to people who come and talk to you, which is the main method of communication I have with people asking questions.
Hrm. Can you stick a "Do not disturb" sign on your door? Or tell people "I'm in the middle of something right now, if you still haven't found it in an hour's time give me a call and I'll get back to you?" ... If you've already thought about all this and you know there's no solution, how do you cope with the non-stop annoyance?
Agreed on the points about research, and people wasting their own time. But, well, your job is probably very different from mine, but here I have to deal with a lot of people who a) genuinely don't have time to go away and learn the things they're asking me (because it's not a big part of their job - even if they sometimes wish it was), or b) simply don't want to learn (and if I tell them "go away and learn" will only pester me more loudly and more insistently). I try to give people answers which point them in the direction of finding things out themselves, and like I said somewhere up there in the comments, it's so satisfying for me when I see the light go on as they realise "I get this! I could learn more about this! I would be able to do this bit of my job so much quicker if I got my head round this stuff!" If they want to learn, I'm happy to spend a bit more time guiding them, if I can; if they don't, I figure it's probably in my interests to answer them as quickly and painlessly as possible to get them out of the way.
If they come with the same "read the manual for me" questions time and time again, though, I find the following approach works quite well as a discouraging tactic:
Them: "How do I do X?"
Me: "Hmmm, let's see... that'd be in the manual... [open document]... and probably in the section of the manual labelled 'X' ... [read slowly, scrolling back and forth a bit so they can't quite pick the bit they want out themself over my shoulder] ... Ah yes, here we are, 'How do I do X?'. So... yeah... [read a bit more, reading out useless phrases occasionally] ... yeah, it looks like what you do is ... [then finally read the relevant bit out]."
Make it slow and painful, and eventually they work out that they can read the docs faster, or Just Fucking Google It (http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/).
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I've heard of these "doors", but I've only encountered one workplace in my life that didn't use open plan offices (and I didn't take the job because it sucked otherwise)
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(I'm usually a helpful kind of person. But I have off-days. :-> )
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You should tell people that you're too busy if that's the case :-)