Understanding SC 3.3.5: Help (Level AAA)

In Brief

Goal

Users can avoid making mistakes.

What to do

Provide help to users on the function currently being performed.

Why it's important

People with cognitive or other disabilities can complete their tasks more easily.

Intent

The intent of this Success Criterion is to help users avoid making mistakes. Some users with disabilities may be more likely to make mistakes than users without disabilities. Using context-sensitive help, users find out how to perform an operation without losing track of what they are doing.

Context-sensitive help only needs to be provided when the label is not sufficient to describe all functionality. The existence of context-sensitive help should be obvious to the user and they should be able to obtain it whenever they require it.

The content author may provide the help text, or the user agent may provide the help text based on technology-specific, programmatically determined information.

Benefits

• Assistance for text input helps individuals with writing disabilities and people with reading and intellectual disabilities who often have difficulty writing text in forms or other places that need text input.
• Additionally, these kinds of assistance help people who are aging and have the same difficulty in text input and/or mouse operation.

Examples

on-line job application

Some of the questions may be hard for new job seekers to understand. A help link next to each question provides instructions and explanations for each question.

Techniques

Each numbered item in this section represents a technique or combination of techniques that the WCAG Working Group deems sufficient for meeting this Success Criterion. A technique may go beyond the minimum requirement of the criterion. There may be other ways of meeting the criterion not covered by these techniques. For information on using other techniques, see Understanding Techniques for WCAG Success Criteria, particularly the "Other Techniques" section.