Documenting your project and build process is an essential part of the final product. By sharing your documentation, you enable others in the community to build upon your original designs and make your creations accessible to a wider audience. This can be transformative, especially for Open Assistive Technology projects that may start as tools for a single user but grow to support people with disabilities worldwide.

Documentation can be daunting, especially for beginner makers, and is often overlooked by more experienced creators. Unfortunately, it is one of the most tedious and uninspiring parts of the making process. Documentation may include various elements such as project descriptions, relevant files, 3D printing instructions, firmware code and installation steps, device usage guidelines, troubleshooting tips, and project licensing. Covering all these aspects can feel overwhelming and may discourage makers from attempting to document their work.

To help support and encourage the documentation process, we have developed a Google Slides template that may be freely copied. The template contains placeholder slides for many of the aspects of project documentation as well as guiding questions. The Google Slides platform is familiar to many users including young makers and can easily support real time collaboration. The platform provides flexibility in adding images and video in one central location and allows for images to be collected using mobile devices as the project is being built.

Slides within this template may be deleted and customized based on the project’s needs. Digital accessibility is also being encouraged during the documentation process to ensure that easy to understand language, alternative text labelling of images, and attention to color contrast and low vision needs.

This template will be an iterative process just like everything else! If you have feedback or additional suggestions on how to improve this file or documentation in general, we would love to hear it.

Happy Making!