Oriana ZambranoConsulting

Technical documentation consulting

Most documentation defects are produced by the system that publishes them.

The same defect comes back in every market, every release. I find where defects are born, and I tell you which ones cost you money.

A scanner gives you 600 findings. I give you the 3 changes that remove 400 of them, and the reason the rest can wait.

Book a 20-minute call

20 minutes. I do not quote on the call. Written offer within 48 hours.

Oriana Zambrano working at her desk, seen in profile, one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse, looking at the screen.

13 years as a technical communicator at Zimory, IBM Deutschland R&D and IXIASOFT (a MadCap company). Structured authoring, DITA pipelines, multi-market publishing.

Based in Berlin. I deliver in English and Spanish. I analyse documentation in English, Spanish, German and French.

I was born with cerebral palsy. I have spent my life navigating systems that were not built for disabled people, and 13 years building the documentation systems that companies publish. When I test for accessibility, I read the findings knowing what a barrier costs the person who hits it.

You publish product documentation and nobody owns it. There is no single person who can say where a manual comes from, who last touched it, or what happens to it when the product changes.

The symptoms look like this.

  1. Your support team answers questions that are already documented.
  2. The same sentence has to be corrected in 26 places, and nobody is sure that all 26 have been found.
  3. You have 2 versions of the same manual live on your own servers, 3 years apart, and both are reachable from search.
  4. A compliance date is approaching and nobody has tested whether your documentation can be read by assistive technology.

If none of that sounds familiar, you do not need me.

Documentation System Diagnostic

The question it answers: why does this keep breaking?

For teams who fixed their documentation once and watched the same problems come back.

I analyse 20 representative published assets and trace each defect back to its source. You receive a defect fingerprint map showing which defects share an origin and which are one-offs, the single points of failure where one component propagates to many outputs, and a ranked list of source-level changes ordered by how many defects each one removes.

Report of 5 to 8 pages. Debrief call available on request.

I need public URLs and 1 hour with whoever publishes.

No repository access required. No credentials. In most cases, no NDA.

ScopeUp to 20 assets

Delivery7 working days from access

Accessibility Audit

The question it answers: where are we exposed, and what does it take to close it?

Automated scanning with every finding manually verified, then manual testing with screen reader and keyboard navigation. Findings are mapped against WCAG 2.1 AA, the level referenced by EN 301 549, and classified by origin: page-level defect, template defect, or generator defect.

You also receive recorded evidence of the 3 most severe blocks, navigated with a screen reader.

Report of 8 to 12 pages, plus the full findings inventory. Debrief call available on request.

How I select the sample. I select the templates, using your traffic data and asset inventory. You may designate up to 3 as mandatory. I count templates, not pages: 26 market storefronts generated from one component are one template.

ScopeUp to 12 unique templates or views

Delivery10 working days from access

Verification re-audit5 working days from access

Once fixes are in place, I re-test the original findings and confirm what closed.

Documentation Audit

The question it answers: what is broken right now, and what do we fix first?

I do not bill for work I have told you not to do.

Full corpus scan with false positives manually cleared. Every finding classified by origin: page, template or generator. Manual sampling of your highest-traffic assets. A cost comparison between fixing at the source and fixing at the surface.

Report of 10 to 15 pages, plus the full findings inventory as a spreadsheet, one row per defect, ready for your team to work from. Debrief call available on request.

The report leads with the 5 or 6 defects that drive returns, support tickets or BFSG non-compliance. Everything else is listed as tolerable noise, with one line explaining why it does not deserve budget.

ScopeUp to 800 assets or 250,000 words, whichever comes first. One source language, one publishing system.

Delivery15 working days from access

Additional markets generated from the same source do not count as additional scope.

Documentation Retainer

The question it answers: who keeps this from degrading again?

I do not enter your repository. Your team merges. You keep control of your own code and your own pipeline.

Custody of your documentation quality, billed monthly rather than as a block of hours.

Every month you receive a corpus scan with a diff against the previous month, showing what improved, what got worse and what is new. Triage by business impact, so you get a short list of what blocks revenue, support or compliance instead of 600 defects. Fixes executed at the source, in the template, the generator or the shared component, because one fix that propagates to 26 markets is worth more than 26 fixes. Corrected files delivered ready to merge, with diffs and change notes. A 2-page monthly report and a 30-minute review call.

Every monthly report carries a standing section listing what I have delivered and what is pending on your side, with dates.

Entry requirement: an audit first. Either audit establishes the baseline.

Minimum commitment: 3 months. Month 1 stabilises, month 2 executes, month 3 is the first month you see the curve bend.

DeliveryMonthly cycle

CapacityMaximum of 2 retainer clients at any time

Also available

Full day of training in Spanish or English. Half day. Stakeholder interviews in Spanish, minimum 3, priced per interview and including the write-up. Below 3 interviews no pattern emerges.

Remote and in-person in Berlin are the same price. Travel outside Berlin is quoted on top.

How the services connect
Service What it answers
DiagnosticWhy it breaks
AuditWhat is broken
RetainerWhat keeps it from breaking again

The diagnostic credits against either audit when contracted within 30 days of the diagnostic report. The audit credits into the retainer when it starts within 30 days of the audit report.

Every audit scores your documentation against the same 8 dimensions, current state and target state, on a scale of 1 to 5. The distance between the two is your roadmap.

This is what makes the audit a method instead of an opinion.

  1. Architecture and content modelGranularity, topic typing, hierarchy depth, readiness for structured content.
  2. Reuse and redundancyDuplicated content, conditional content opportunities, ratio of unique content.
  3. LocalisabilityText embedded in images, concatenated strings, expressions that do not travel, absence of translation memory.
  4. FindabilityTitles, metadata, navigation, quality of internal search.
  5. Terminological consistencyCompeting variants of the same term, absent glossary, divergence between interface and documentation.
  6. Procedure qualityTask orientation, declared prerequisites, verifiable outcomes, step length.
  7. Tooling and publishingSource format, version control, automation, manual bottlenecks.
  8. Governance and maintenanceContent ownership, update cadence, orphaned content, expired content.

How the work is done.

  1. The full corpus is processed before anything is read. Processing does not replace reading. It removes the irrelevant, so that reading becomes verification instead of sweeping.
  2. Every finding that appears in your report has been seen in its original context, with its exact location, before it was written down.
  3. That rule exists for one moment. In the debrief call, your documentation lead will say that a finding is wrong because there is a historical reason for it. With the exact citation and the surrounding context, the conversation continues. Without it, the whole report loses its authority.

What the full corpus reveals that sampling does not.

In a recent audit of a complete administration manual for an open source product, cross-section duplication affected 30 documents across 35 pairs of literal repetition. One pair shared 291 identical words. In another, 71% of the smaller document sat inside the larger one, and the two belonged to different sections of the manual.

None of that appears if you audit sections in isolation. It is the most expensive finding in the report and it is invisible without the full corpus.

What I do not do.

This list appears in every proposal, with this heading.

  • Implementing the fixes.
  • Writing or rewriting content.
  • Content migration, DITA conversion, CCMS configuration, tooling work.
  • Translation or localisation.
  • Certification or declaration of conformity.
  • Legal advice.
  • Reports or deliverables in German.
  • Benchmarking against competitors or SEO analysis.
  • Response windows shorter than 48 hours.

The European Accessibility Act has applied across the EU since 28 June 2025. In Germany it is implemented through the Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz. Its penalty provisions name the instructions for use that accompany a product, which puts manuals and product help in scope, not only the website.

I document technical findings and where they originate. Whether your specific case falls short of the law is a question for your legal counsel.

How we start.

  1. 3 questions by email before we book anything: how many assets and in how many languages, who makes the decision, and what made you write now.
  2. A 20-minute discovery call. I listen and define scope. I do not quote.
  3. A written offer within 48 hours, with fixed scope and fixed price.

Every delivery clock starts when I have access, not at signature.

Delivery times
Service Delivery
Documentation System Diagnostic7 working days
Accessibility Audit10 working days
Documentation Audit15 working days
Verification re-audit5 working days
RetainerMonthly cycle

Book a 20-minute call