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> instruction manuals ... often have useful information ... A surprising number of my peers don’t realize this.

That's because instruction manuals always have a lot of useless information, and many of them have only such useless information. One of my computer mice came with guidance to avoid prolonged contact with skin and I'm pretty sure nothing in that manual was of any value.

discuss

Tor3|18 days ago

Manuals used to have tens of pages of useful information, if not more. These days it's just tens, if not a hundred pages of (mostly meaningless) warnings, in different languages, and sometimes only that. If you're lucky there's a single page of mostly pictures and a few lines of text, and typically just the obvious parts. I went through some old storage boxes yesterday. Found "manuals" for a number of items. One had four manuals. Turned out it was just that they could only stuff half a dozen languages of warnings in one manual, so they made a bunch of them, all just the same warnings, in different languages. More paper for the recycling centre.

tgsovlerkhgsel|18 days ago

I particularly miss the spec page that used to be standard in every manual and is now increasingly rare.

Of course, the really old/good manuals also had schematics, and there were a few cases where those were really help when we actually had to repair stuff like that. For some simpler things that would make sense even today but it ain't happening...

dlcarrier|18 days ago

Instruction manuals often only contain legally required information, making them particularly useless.

You've happened upon the difference between compliant and capable. See also, any military technology, which costs 10 times the normal price to meet strict compliance requirements, often while completely disregarding capability.

My favorite response to the issue is the AcessiByeBye plug-in (https://www.accessibyebye.org/) which blocks accessibility compliance overlays that make web pages difficult to use with keyboard navigation and accessibility tools like screen readers, but are needed to meet accessibility regulations.