 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. A heading is essentially a title that sets one section apart from another. So a heading you might think of as usually centered and bolder text, possibly a different color, but it's going to be a chapter title or the title of a new section. So visually, there isn't any difference between a real heading and a fake heading. So a real heading is going to be centered, it's going to be larger than the rest of the text, and it's going to be visually obvious that this is a new title. A sister technology, however, doesn't look at the visual presentation of a page. It doesn't care whether text is really large or really small. All it cares about is how the heading is coded. So when you go to a website on the internet and you see some blue underlined text, that's usually going to be a link. A sister technology knows that's a link because of how it's coded, and it's the same for headings. So when a publisher is setting up a heading, they're going to determine how they want that heading to look visually, and then they have the option of tagging it as a heading. And if they tag it as a heading, they have to determine a heading level. So usually it's going to be heading level one for a top level heading and then down to two or three. If they don't tag that style as a heading, it becomes invisible to assistive technology. Chapter one just looks the same as the rest of the narrative. So visually, it looks like a heading. To assistive technology, it just looks like another paragraph of text, and that is a fake heading. So when you're reading a web page or an e-book because they both present in very much the same way, when you're reading content, the screen reader will actually say heading level one, chapter one, or heading level two, how the railway was built in Canada. So it's actually audibly going to say, hey, this is a heading, so this is the start of a new section. We have some text that's really important here, and Braille displays have the same option of indicating to their readers who are reading a book by touch that they've come to a new title if it's set up as a real heading. A lot of applications have the ability to listen to a book. So there are two ways really to listen to a book. You can ask your screen reader to read it out, so it's just going to take it like a web page or a word document and just plow through the whole book. Or sometimes a reading system or a reading app will have a listen button, and sometimes that could be really cool because it's specifically designed for reading out a book, so it might have some new features like a pause between chapters or between paragraphs even or the ability to announce a new page. So you can get some really neat features if your reading app has a listen feature, if it's designed properly. And same thing, often times when you're reading a book, you can set your reading app up to have a pause when it goes to a new chapter, and that pause is determined by a real heading. Smartphones, almost all smartphones have the ability to turn on speech feedback. So if you go into just a regular commercial reading app on your smartphone and you turn on voiceover or talk back if you're using iOS or Android, you can just touch that heading, and usually your screen reader will announce that it's a heading, so it might say a heading level two and then read the text that's on that heading. Typically if it doesn't indicate it's a heading, it's fake. If you're reading through a document and it says, so on the north side of Antarctica chapter two, it'll just continue like chapter two is an extra bit of the sentence. When it's not, it's really switching to an entirely different part of the book. When you're setting up the headings in your book, you want them to cascade. So that's just a fancy word that means you want level one headings to be the most important sections in your book or the top level sections in your book, and then level two, the slightly smaller headings are going to be for subsections. So if you have a book that has say four parts, those four parts are going to be, each one of those parts should have a level one heading. So a level one heading for part one and part two and so on. And the chapters under those parts are smaller sections. So those should have level two headings. And then under those chapters, you might have a couple of little sections. Again, those are smaller than your chapters, which are smaller than your parts. So those should have level three headings. So as we set up this hierarchy of large, medium and small headings, level one, level two and level three, the headings are said to cascade. Why is that important? So when you're navigating a book, you have the option, when you're using some specialized reading systems, which are common with non-traditional readers, to set your reading system to move by a particular level. If you're tired of part one and you want to move right to part two, you can set your reading system to move by a level one heading and with one tap of a button, move right to part two. So if the headings cascade properly, if they're set up in a sensible hierarchical structure, we call it, then there's tremendous ability for navigation that isn't possible if you just say use level one headings for all the sections. If a heading is real, then it allows for a lot of navigation in the book. So if you're in a book group and you guys are all starting in chapter three, well when you open up the book, if you're already on chapter five, you've read ahead a little bit, then you can just click twice on the previous button and all of a sudden you're on chapter three. Headings aren't just used for navigation. Headings are used to understand the underlying structure of a book. So if you're just reading a regular chapter book, it's going to have ten chapters, that's pretty straightforward, you're going to move from chapter one to chapter two. The headings are going to be indicating when you're moving to a new chapter and sometimes that can be really important if you have a book where each chapter is narrated by a different person, for instance. You really want to know that you're moving to a different chapter, different narrator, a different scene, maybe a different time period. So having that screen reader indicate heading level one tells you very clearly that you're moving to a new chapter or if it's giving a nice pause in between chapters. Again, this is really important. But it's not just for that. If you're going through a nonfiction title where you have sections and subsections and parts and units and chapters and it has a complex reading order, a complex structure that it was put together with, these headings give readers a really quick idea of how the book is set up. And you can learn by going through the headings in the book how it's laid out. So you might learn that you have units and sections and things like that. And it gives clear definition between the content. Without headings, oftentimes non-traditional readers are presented with one big wall of text. There aren't proper definitions or separations between sections and it's really difficult to know when the author or the content creator is moving to a different idea. It just goes on and on and on like a massive run on sentence. Before you start setting up your content, you want to be giving some thought to where you want the headings to be and what headings are going to indicate important sections. So giving a couple minutes of thought to what are the top level sections in this book? What are the major sections that are navigation points or totally new ideas? Those are going to be your top level or your level one headings. And then what sections are children of that parent section if you will? What are the same kind of idea but we're moving to a different thought or it's a section that's under the parent umbrella. Those are going to be lower level sections. Some publishers will use the headings in their book to set up a table of contents. And if that isn't how your workflow is set up, it's worth giving some thought to how it's going to lay out. So ideally a table of contents is going to be set up as a list and you'll have important sections in the margin and you'll have secondary sections slightly indented from those and however your table of contents is set up, you want your heading structure to match. So the most important sections are the ones that are in the margin and in that table of contents you want to be top level headings and not only does that offer continuity between the table of contents and the content in your book, it is another great way for readers to get a feel of how your content is laid out. So setting up correctly cascading headings can be used to inform your table of contents and they have the navigation tools in your book so everything fits together properly.