# Understanding Help

## 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 of Help

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 of Help

- 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 of Help

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.

## Resources for Help

## Techniques for Help

### Sufficient Techniques for Help

#### Situation A: If a form requires text input:

- Providing a help link on every Web page
- Providing help by an assistant in the Web page
- Providing spell checking and suggestions for text input if applicable to the language
- Providing text instructions at the beginning of a form or set of fields that describes the necessary input

#### Situation B: If a form requires text input in an expected data format:

- Providing expected data format and example
- Providing text instructions at the beginning of a form or set of fields that describes the necessary input

### Additional Techniques (Advisory) for Help

- Using the title attribute to provide context-sensitive help

### Failures for Help