Guideline 12:
Provide accessible user agent documentation and help

Ensure that the user can learn about software features that benefit accessibility from the documentation. Ensure that the documentation is accessible.

Documentation of the user interface is important, as is documentation of the user agent's underlying functionalities. While intuitive user interface design is valuable to many users, some users may still not be able to understand or be able to operate the native user interface without thorough documentation. For instance, a user with blindness may not find a graphical user interface intuitive without supporting documentation.

There are three types of requirements in this guideline:

1. accessibility of the documentation (checkpoint 12.1)
2. minimal requirements of what must be documented (checkpoints 12.2, 12.3, and 12.4). Documentation should include much more to explain how to install, get help for, use, or configure the user agent
3. organization of the documentation (checkpoint 12.5)

See checkpoint 7.3 for information about following system conventions for documentation.