 Hello this is John with Nels and in this demo on diversity of reading I'm going to be demonstrating JAWS, JAWS screen reader with Bookshelf which is a reading app by VitalSource and I'm running JAWS 2022 with Windows 11. Bookshelf version is an older version designed for Windows 7 and Windows 8. I found that the newer versions didn't work very well with this version of JAWS so I ended up using the older versions for this demo and we will demo a book created by Nels for these series of presentations that has a variety of elements that we can demonstrate how they are read by assistive technology. And once I do the JAWS demo I will do a brief demo of read aloud in another reading app called Bookworm and finish with some thoughts on some different reading apps. So we'll start going through the book here. I will not cover all the text in the book but try to give you enough context to get a sense of how these different elements are read when I read them with JAWS. So we'll start with the cover page. Cover page. And in this case all it says is cover page even though there is an alternative text description of the cover image it isn't read with this combination of green reader and the reading app. So we'll move to the next section. Document. Page has one region and no links. Title page, title page region, page I, NNELS accessible publishing summit demo dash 2020 free title page region end. And there we had the title page and JAWS is quite customizable as far as what it reads. I have adjusted it a little bit so a couple of things are indicated that are not read by default so we can get a sense of what capabilities are but most of this will apply even with default settings. So we have the text of the title page along with the page number at the beginning and that's all we have here I'll move on to the next section. Accessible publishing summit demo dash 2023 page has one region and two links copyright page copyright page region page IECC0 slash public domain accessible published publishing. And here we have the copyright page and you'll notice some of these pages say there's a region and that's just an area of text defined by the author of the book. It's possible to give a label to a region of text and for example this copyright page doesn't have a visible label in the text but that's been added as a label for this region. Some regions will have a visible heading in the text for the label it just depends on the section. And one thing about this section is there's a link further down in the check that goes to the NNELS website or just move down till we find that. No rights reserved published by colon link national network for equitable library service. And I'm just moving down by line so there we had the link and if I activated that it would run launch my browser and go to the NNELS website. Now links can be helpful especially if the reader is using maybe a touchscreen device that has we're entering URLs or copying and pasting a URL is not sufficient then with a keyboard but they are useful on computers as well to be able to open a URL without needing to manually copy an address. So I'll move to the next section. Page has no links dedication block quote page E to all readers block quote N. So we have the dedication. Let's get past this and we'll move to the first chapter of the book. Page one chapter 1 a novel dash like chapter heading level one page has six settings and no links chapter one chapter. And so I'll stop the reading there so we can go through some of it in more detail. So the first thing we have is a heading and it's two line heading but it's been quoted as the one heading element so that if I move by headings it will only land on the heading once instead of chapter one is the first line and the novel like chapter for the headings the second line but what it's quoted as one element if I move by heading it only stops once on that entire heading. And I'll move down we'll get to the level one page one chapter one heading level one the novel dash like chapter block quote left quote forget what you think you know vampires exist right quote M dash blade block quote N three May districts. There we had an epigraph in its markup as a block quote it's a little bit set it off a little bit from the text now there is a set that was on the side there is a accessibility role that can be set on a element like a block quote or a paragraph to mark it as an epigraph when using that wouldn't cause any trouble with reading systems that I've tried but it isn't supported from what I found even so it's it is available to mark an epigraph so that a screen reader could potentially indicate that it's an epigraph but it's hasn't received support to this point from my experience. So now we have the starting the text of the chapter and I'll just move through these sections this chapter is divided up by headings so I'll just move through the headings and we can read some of the different elements section with a block quote heading level two. So here we have a block quotation and Jaws as we saw with the epigraph it does indicate when a block quote starts and ends so if I move down I will now share a letter I received from my love block quote 17 Chatham Street. So now we're getting into the content of the letter and I could continue reading this as I've read normally as I read the text another thing I can do when it's marked up as a block quote as I know I want to skip past the to the end of this I can skip to the end of the element and it will skip past the block quote in this case skip to the end of it so I don't have to read the whole thing if I don't want to I can skip to the text that's after the block quote. So it's jumping to the end here and I'll keep moving down. Now we come to a context break and context breaks can be marked up visually in various ways such as an asterisk or some blank space but if they aren't marked up in the way that screen readers are able to indicate them there's no there's no indication of the context break in the case it is marked up so we'll move down. He displayed a skill in page three the choice of crown and the use of light troops and then securing his own supplies whilst he cut off those of the enemy which Kartikaya himself god of war might have envied separator. Dr. Heraklius Gloss was a very learned man although no. And so there we had the paragraph and then the context break and then the start of the next paragraph in the context break there's a separator there and that tells me there's some a change of context here between these paragraphs and also it indicated the page breaks. Now page breaks can be marked up in the text as it is here and typically I found that reading systems will either read them or they may not read them at all but they don't give you as a choice and this is one area where I'd like to see some flexibility that even though page breaks are marked up in this book if the reading system offered or a screen reader offered a choice where the break could be indicated or skipped that would give readers an option of skipping them if they didn't necessarily want to hear the page breaks in the middle of the sentence. But the fact that they are marked up does give the possibilities of being able to know exactly where the text of page starts if I wanted to go to a page number I can find out where that text starts or if I wanted to cite a passage in the book then I can tell exactly what page that's on so even though there is the issue now of screen readers reading the page numbers the mid-sentence in some cases I would say in my opinion it's still useful to have them since it does give the added benefit of knowing where the pages the page divisions are. So let's skip to the next section. So here we have a language shift heading level three with a marked up language shift which is a piece of text that's in a secondary language other than the different language other than the main text where here we have English expression refers to an inability to think of a witty comeback left parent or any sort of intelligent response right parent until it's too late to be of any use. So in this section it's had the language shift marked up in a proper French denunciation now we'll hear it without the language shift heading level three without a marked up language shift the French expression of our less but the less clearly refers to an inability to think of so in that case the reading flow is smoother but it doesn't have proper French pronunciation there and that's often the trade-off is that text-to-speech systems need to switch voices to read in another language so it does create a pause and in some cases a different voice depending on the green reader or reading system how its speech is configured. And typically it knows we advise doing it for phrases or sentences but not as much for single words and there's no hard and fast rule in some cases but it's more just something to be aware of that it does cause a voice change like this and if you have a lot of single words where there's language shifts it can be a bit jarring. So now we'll skip to the second chapter. Chapter two a more scholarly chapter heading level one. And there's the heading now the start of this is the same within the progress so I'll skip to the next heading here. Section with list heading level two. And now we have a list I'll just read through some of the texts before the list here. There we have a list of three items and I was able to arrow through them I can also move forward and backward by list items if I move backwards. In this case it's not making a much of a difference since each list item is on its own line but if it was a reference section for example with like a bibliography or a set of footnotes and notes where there was a title of the work followed by a URL it might be on multiple lines. So in that case moving by list items can be a benefit. Another thing that can help is this list also has only has one level of hierarchy so there's just one level of the three items but if let's say the first item had three sub-items that were indented underneath it it's possible to mark that up as a nested list so Jaws can indicate that the next three items are underneath this first one. And if the list is just marked up as a set of paragraphs with indentation used to show the hierarchy that hierarchy is lost with the screen reader. And I'll skip to the next section there is also a numbered list here but it's the navigation is not the same as the bulleted ones. Images section heading level two now we have images and in this section we have two images there's a regular one with some bulk text and one following that that has a longer description it needs more description so we'll review the regular heading level three regular image one day when he was strolling in the square at Blanson he saw a large wooden hut from which came the sound of terrible howling while on the platform a mount mangan coherently invited the crowd to come and see the terrible Apache tamer tomahick or humbling thunder a drawing of a shirtless white man he reaches upwards with one arm against a starry night sky text reads colon for asparagus at astrographic figure one colon illustration from finland in the 19th century and so in that case we had the text followed by the image description that was read and then the figure caption now in this case jaws isn't indicating the fact that the image and the caption are in a figure element which kind of sets it off from the text around it so it kind of loops the two together and also one more other thing to point out about the image description is that it does have some some Latin text at the end there now an image description like this is just a string of text it doesn't offer any capability of specifying markup like lists or tables or language shifts but in this case my opinion it isn't too big of a deal since I am able to go through text in detail if I want to spell words and so forth and otherwise this image description is short enough to fit in outbreaks like this so in my opinion that's it's okay we'll move over to the next image link long description that in level three a map of the camerton and limbley stoke railway in north somerset click the link below to navigate the long description graphic and so there we have the alt text and i'll move down to colon map from the map that changed the world have the figure capture long description for figure two and here we have the long description i'll activate that and this opens uh goes to another page in the ebook with the description long description for figure two link document page has two eddings and one link heading level two figure two colon map from the map that changed the world a map of the camerton and limbley stoke railway in and this is a set of paragraphs here that describes the map in more detail and i can read this just like any other second other section of text in the book so now i will tab i'll get to a link that's uh back link that returns back to the image return to figure two link if i activate that document page has one region twelve eddings and one link a map of the camerton and limbley stoke railway in north somerset click the link below to navigate the law navigate so now we're back to the image and it landed us on the text of that image and the last thing i'll show here is a table this book does also have footnotes and end notes but in this reading app they don't work particularly well in that john does read the the note reference like a star or the footnote or a number one for the end note reference but it aren't indicated as a link and also the footnote isn't read as a any different than a regular paragraph it doesn't indicate it's a footnote but some combinations of reading apps and a screen reader which is screen readers will support that better page seven section with a footnote and an end note footnote section at end note section at in level three section with a table at in level two so we're just skipping by heading there to get to the table now tables can be marked up so that the screen reader is able to properly indicate what the errors are for the the content sells as i move through so i'll move down table with three columns and five rows tells me the size name of emperor now i'm getting into the the content so i'm on the first uh cell at the top left i'll move down i can move to do this table by rows and columns so i'll move down the column augustus row two so i have the name of the emperor and if i move to the right length of reign in years 41 column two uh so that now we got the length of reign in years that's the heading for the column and it read the number after it which is the content in cell and if tables are marked up for example as an image i don't have this option to navigate the table in as much detail and in that case if it does need to be presented as an image the next best alternative would be to have a long description for that that would link to a table in a different area of the book that is coded up as a table so that i have the navigation options so that's all i will demonstrate for the moment here with this book but i will switch to the bookworm app to show read aloud and now we'll play a little bit of the read aloud of the first chapter chapter one a novel like chapter forget what you think you know vampires exist blade may third stopped so as you hear there it read the text but it didn't read any of the information about it like the fact that the chapter heading was a heading or that there was the block for the epigraph and typically read aloud can be useful especially for users that want to hear the text read out but might be able to see the visual content maybe somebody with disability like dyslexia or blind user might use this in the case where they just want to listen to the text but they don't hear so much about the format and the semantics of it but typically i would use a screen reader most of the time because that gives me more information about the text of the structure of the book and more and navigation richer navigation experience so that's what i have for the demo but i would like to end with some thoughts about some different reading apps so start with a adobe digital editions was one of them that i reviewed and it does read most of the text but it doesn't read headings very well the fact that text is a heading or image descriptions things like that that i was getting was the bookshelf experience now in some cases with unprotected epa books there is a separate view that does the more of this information most of the books i've tried in adobe digital editions don't have that option and it does sometimes tend to crash putting on the ebook when opening it with a screen reader the bookshelf app that we covered here is similar in that vital source does have a selection of books that's designed to be read in the app but it does also offer the option side of the books which is what we did here loaded the book into it now the newer version of bookshelf has found it to be a little bit more sluggish when navigating with a screen reader than the the older one here and also or certain types of navigation like activating a link or maybe going to a page you tended to throw the focus off of the reading area so i needed to navigate back to the reading area which is a little bit inefficient and also it tends to not put the focus at the desired point if for example i wanted to navigate back from a note back to the reference if the focus is thrown off i might be placed in the correct document once i navigate to the reading area but i'm not put into focus of the note reference so that's the downside in those cases when focus gets taken out of the reading area and another one i looked at was dolphin easy reader and for the most part it reads the text quite well though there are some situations such as links to footnotes and that kind of thing not working with a screen reader that now doesn't work to navigate to the link and page breaks aren't read at all with that particular app i wasn't sure whether it's a design decision or whether it's just a fact of the way the reading system is implemented that these links aren't read and another one i looked at here was bookworm that's the one we used for the read aloud this one presents the text of the book in a basically a text box and does have some options to navigate geese to move to different elements like headings and tables but it doesn't give this richer reading experience as when i was able to read the get context of the elements as i'm reading so once in a text box i don't get the the context that what i'm moving past is a heading or the table navigation now this app does have a web view to be able to view the content in a browser and that offers some more navigation possibilities but it doesn't offer the example the option for example to move between sections easily without choosing a section from the context let's think or go to page functionality another one i'll mention here was uh is google playbooks and this one works by letting you upload a book into the uh through your browser and read it in a browser um and the text was read okay but the main disadvantage here is that it presented to take one page at a time instead of typically reading applications will present a document at a time so in this case we had uh each chapter of the book in a separate document so in books if we were able to read a chapter at a time versus um when i need to read a page at a time uh i need to frequently use the option to move to the next page and then navigate to the top of the page to keep reading so it's a lot of smoother reading experience and one app that works quite well with screen leaders is thorium and the my colleague is demonstrating that you know presentation but in general i found that that works quite well for navigating pages the focus is tends to be placed correctly in most cases on the correct position in the text and the last thing i'll mention here so as you see there's a uh it depends both on having a accessible uh reading reading system combination of reading system and screen reader and also good markup in book to have uh that content read well and sometimes uh DRM or digital rights management is used which limits the uh work so that it can only be read with a particular reading system and if that system doesn't have very good accessibility then a user screen reader user is limited to uh whatever accessibility that system does provide so it can be an accessibility failure it doesn't provide a good reading experience or for example if it only provides uh read aloud like functionality where i can hear the text but not the information about it that with the structure uh then that can be uh not as useful and it's helpful if books are marked up well since if reading systems do improve in the future then that content will be available already just a matter of the reading system taking advantage of content that's marked up and as well if books are made available through systems like sila and nels where readers can read with their preferred reading system then they're able to take advantage of any accessibility that that reader reading system offers for any content that's well marked up in the book they're not limited to a particular reading app and so i hope this presentation has given you a good sense of the very variation there can be in reading systems when you're used with a screen reader and the different types of experiences that readers will have