 This video was 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 sight impairment, so I can read print just fine. It's just reading print and understanding print are two very different things. Back in the day when computers were just starting to catch on, I would check out regular printed books in the public library, and then I'd bring them home and scan them into the computer using optical character recognition. Then I'd record the book using the computer's synthetic speech, which wasn't quite what it is nowadays, onto cassette tape, and read the book that way. It was sort of a semi-perfect copy, but there were errors in the text that we created because it was the best that the computer could do at the time. We've come a long way since then with electronic publications now becoming more popular, and a lot of publishers releasing their books in e-book format, a lot of those challenges have gone away, and there is much greater access to material. And that really helps me to understand what's going on. With that, however, has come a whole new area of challenges, and if publishers aren't aware of accessibility when they're producing their e-books, there can be other challenges that make it difficult to access the material. Right from the beginning, we're picking out books in different ways. So you go to the library and you're looking at the pictures on the front cover of books, and you're saying, OK, that's a vampire. I don't want to read that. Oh, this looks cool. This is a picture of a sailboat. I'm going to check out this book. And there are mechanisms in place to make it so blind readers have access to that material as well, and those mechanisms are not being well utilized today. So looking at the picture on the front cover is a really good way for traditional readers to select something they want to read. And when that cover image isn't described or when that information isn't made available to potential purchasers of e-books, it creates a barrier right at the very beginning of selecting what books to read. Once you select a book and you open it up in your reading system, there may not be a way to listen to it, or it may read it one word at a time. You rely on each other, their horses, and... You may not be able to skip to the next chapter if a table of contents hasn't been well utilized in the book. So right from the selection process, right through actually reading that material, there are common challenges presented to non-traditional readers. Born accessible publishing stems from an understanding of what all readers need when they want to consume the material. So when publishers aren't aware of accessibility when they're setting up a publication, some fairly simple errors can be made that really impact the ability for everyone to read the book. In the olden days, I would read books on cassette tape or in braille, and both of those were fairly bulky methods. Nowadays, it's just something like what you would expect. So it's an Android tablet or an iPad, and each one of these solutions has accessibility technology built right into it. So you can turn on voiceover on the iPad or talk back on the Android tablet and use it with a special touch and swipe gestures so that it will read everything that comes up on the screen. And reading e-books is done in exactly the same way. If a book is presented in text, you can load up a regular reading app or something that's designed for blind readers. But either way, it's going to pull up that e-book and make it so you can read it out loud. There are more specialized solutions like this reader with a whole bunch of buttons, which also works. But more and more, as publications become accessible, it isn't necessary to get specialized technology. If the book is produced properly, it can be read on something that you would usually have with you, like an iPhone or a tablet. They can use pretty much anything that anybody else uses. So anything that has a screen, they can use, whether they're blind, visually impaired, or have a cognitive disability or even some physical disability that doesn't allow them to turn pages. Any of those should be easy to make do with on a smartphone or tablet or anything to that effect. There are several reasons why publishers should be concerned about accessible publishing. First of all, obviously it increases their market. The more people have access to their content, then the more people are going to be interested in purchasing that material. It's good for public relations. Publishers who are known to care about minorities and be concerned about producing material that they find easy to read are certainly well respected in the publishing industry. So there's certainly an easy business case to be made for born accessible publishing as far as increasing the market. But consumers nowadays are concerned about minorities and they're excited about procuring material from companies who are catering to minorities as well. So one thing that we see a lot of the time is books that lack proper navigation. So you might open onto a cover page that just presents as a full-sized graphic. You have no idea what book you're supposed to be reading or what the next steps might be. You move into the title page, which may also be text set as an image. It's lacking any kind of navigation, so you're just trying to move through the book page by page and get a feel of what's going on. It can be really difficult to get a feel for how the book is laid out and where the content is supposed to start. So right off the hop, even though you have a book that's presented as text, it's very difficult to drill down and find out where that narrative begins and what the book even is, just from opening it up at first glance. Producing accessible content is not difficult. And that's the first thing that we really want to make clear, is you don't need to know code to produce a 100% accessible book. You don't need to go through schooling or special training. It really is fairly common sense stuff. There are some somewhat technical aspects to it, to producing a great e-book that everyone can read, but ultimately it isn't difficult to do.