 This video is produced with support from the Government of Canada's social development partnerships program, Disability Component. The opinions and interpretations in this video are those of the creator, and do not necessarily reflect those of the Government of Canada. Welcome to a Crash Course in Nells. This series is designed to give you the tools you need to produce accessible e-books, making them even more enjoyable for all readers. My name is Danny. I'm an accessibility tester with the National Network for Equitable Library Service. I was born blind, so I usually read books audibly or in braille. My name is Caden Farris. I don't have a slight impairment, so I can read print just fine. It's just reading print and understanding print are two very different things. Some publishers try to add accessibility to the end of their publication workflow. So they end up with an e-pub that's been produced by their third party producer, and they're ready to throw it up on Amazon. And just before they drop it into Kindle, they say, oh, let's add some accessibility. And it's a great idea. It's always good to think about accessibility no matter where that comes up in the team. But ideally, accessibility would be part of the building blocks of this e-pub, not tried to address at the end. So content creators are the best ones to describe their images. They're the ones that are creating them. They know what's important to the text. If they were describing these images, not only would it be much easier for publishers to produce an accessible copy of the book, but the descriptions are going to be a much higher caliber because they're the ones that are most familiar with the content they've created. The reason I believe publishers should be thinking about accessibility from the very beginning is it makes the book a lot more accessible in the long run, and it also makes it a lot easier. Instead of trying to do all that work just in one small time span, just two weeks before the book is published, having it done all the way through makes for a lot better book for everybody, and it doesn't make the workflow cramped. People who are setting up the book for print when they're designing their headings and when they're laying out the table of contents, they can be doing that in an accessible way. And readers know how many items there are in the list. And all these building blocks of an accessible publication can flow through the lifespan of this book's creation so that by the time that book ends up as an EPUB, it's already 95% or 98% accessible. We have a couple of final tweaks to do before it's cooked and sent out into the world to be distributed. So that, I think, is the most important piece is whoever you can involve in this to encourage accessibility and to build this accessible content, the better the finished product is going to be and the easier it's going to be for everyone. Making things accessible is not as hard as you think. It's generally just a swipe down a menu here or a very slight tweak to a table or to the way that your workflow is presented, but it doesn't take very much time, especially once you've gotten used to it. A lot of it can be done just from reviewing your own content in an e-reader. So if you're reading that book on a smartphone, you can actually turn on voiceover and explore it by using touch gestures or enabling a listen feature. And if you're hearing different headings being announced, list items being announced, if you're hearing tables being read with their headings for each column, if you have good navigation points within the text and within the chapter list in your reading app, chances are you've got a really accessible leap up. But if you're hearing it being read word by word, or you're hearing garbage when it's passing over an image, you've got some work to do. So a lot of the testing can be done right from your smartphone, loaded into an app, hit the listen button and see what you get. You're not going to discover all of it because you may not be as familiar with reading books audibly, but it can be a really good first step to determining how accessible your content is. When publishers are ready to start distributing their e-book, they want to make sure that the metadata has been included. So this is going to ensure that everyone who has access to this content is aware that it's going to be good for them. It's going to work well in their reading system. So that's really the final piece, is make sure that you've specified as much accessibility metadata as you can so that everyone knows how workable this book is going to be for them. There are organizations throughout Canada who have access to accessibility testers that specialize in different fields of accessibility. So the possibility exists to give your EPUB to one of these organizations to share it with an accessibility tester and say, hey, take this for a test drive, see how this works with your assistive technology so they can try reading it with their braille display or listening to it audibly or magnifying the text and changing the margins, adjusting the contrast. This can happen very quickly because they're familiar with the technology and they can give you recommendations of you've done a really good job with this reflowable EPUB but we want to see it in EPUB 3, for example. So these are quick tests that accessibility testers who are familiar with their technology can perform very quickly and give you some really targeted feedback to improve what you're producing. I do a lot of reading for pleasure and when I set a book in my reading system and hit play, I just want to enjoy reading a good book. And if it's poorly designed, if it's difficult to navigate, if it doesn't read properly, it really detracts sharply from the reading experience. This is something that was supposed to be enjoyable and it's jumping all over the place. I can't find where I left off reading before. It's pausing at all these different italicized words and it's not a good experience. It's not an enjoyable experience. I'm just going to move to a different book because this isn't at all what I had in mind. And it's so easy to produce accessible material. It's frustrating to me to see publishers go to all the work of producing an E-book that is ostensibly offered in text and thus should be completely accessible and yet that final touch wasn't done and so the book is still really difficult and frustrating to read. I think that having information accessible to all is just a genuine human right and I think that having books accessible is not something that's very hard to do and I think that it should have been done a long time ago. And with that, we come to the end of a crash course in E-book accessibility. We hope you feel empowered to unleash the full potential of E-Pub by producing your first born accessible books. And if you ever get stuck, you might just find the answer on accessiblepublishing.ca. Thanks so much for watching and let's continue to change the world one book at a time.