Evaluating a workflow for authoring multimodal DITA

Abstract

This poster presentation reports on preliminary evaluation of OVID (Online Video), an open source DITA Open Toolkit plug-in that allows insertion of HTML5 video tags in web help topics. OVID converts DITA inline links into multimedia HTML5 tags (video, audio, and canvas). Students in an advanced undergraduate technical communication course participated in a quasi-empirical evaluation of the authoring workflow needed to create OVID-enhanced DITA topics and maps. Findings suggest that the process of identifying, tagging, and coding video elements does not represent a serious burden to authors, and participants described it as being easier and faster than writing DITA topics and maps.