Comments on mice don't tap and tablet-users don't click: what word can I use for all audiences instead?
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mice don't tap and tablet-users don't click: what word can I use for all audiences instead?
I am documenting features on a web site. The audience is end users, who could be anywhere from seasoned Internet veterans to relatively new people who came for my site's content but aren't generally online for hours every day. People visit the web site on a variety of devices, from phones (mobile site, touch) to tablets (desktop site, touch) to traditional computers (desktop site, mouse), and we do not plan to make documentation variants per form factor. (The site itself is responsive and follows mobile and desktop conventions as applicable.)
The documentation style is imperative, not descriptive (for clarity and to follow widespread convention). Sometimes the documentation needs to tell the user to interact with a button or link. Before mobile, we would have said "click". People reading on mobile devices know to mentally translate "click" to "tap" when reading instructions, but it makes me wonder if they are, in the back of their minds, wondering whether mobile is an afterthought for us and what else might be wrong in our documentation, so if I can find a better term I'd like to.
I considered "select", but to experienced techies that means "highlight", not "invoke". I don't know how much I should be concerned about that when writing for a general audience. (Most of my previous work has been for very technical readers and must be precise.)
Is there a general-purpose, concise term that works in imperative voice for "invoke a thing in a UI"?
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I just looked up what Borland wrote in their user manual of the Turbo Pascal UI back when using a mouse was optional and the UI could be operated also by keyboard (you don't click on the keyboard either). The word they used for buttons was “choose”. For example, this is an excerpt from their manual:
This dialog box has three standard action buttons: OK, Cancel, and Help.
If you choose OK, the choices in the dialog box are made in the IDE.
If you choose Cancel, nothing changes and no action is done, but the dialog box is put away; […]
If you choose Help, […]
If you're using the mouse, you can click the button you want. When you're using the keyboard […]
For check boxes, radio buttons and list box entries, they used “select”.
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