 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 Ferris. 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. An e-pub file is essentially an e-book in a box. So each chapter of your book is going to be set up as a separate page, and then there are a few other files that hold everything together, and then it's all wrapped into one convenient package. So, e-books are very similar to websites. They have a table of contents that takes you to different chapters in the book or different pages on the site, but unlike a website, e-pubs are really distributable. It's just a single file that contains all of these different elements, so it's really easy to distribute among your network. The genesis of e-pub really occurred about 20 years ago with a standard that sought to offer a way for electronic books to be produced in one standard format. And about 15 years ago, we saw the first e-pub two-books coming out, and they were based on a standard very similar to e-pub three. There are two versions of e-pub that are commonly in use nowadays, e-pub two and e-pub three, and this was revolutionary for the electronic publishing industry because for the first time, we had a format that was specifically designed for electronic books. And the sky was the limit at that point because anything could be added to these archives. They were so flexible and so scalable based on HTML, which made them open to anything that was added later on to websites or to the internet in general. And it blossomed into this standard that we have nowadays for e-pub three, which can contain text, audio, pictures, video, almost any conceivable format of multimedia synchronized with the text that we have in e-books. So it offered this collage of multimedia that could be synchronized with your regular book. E-pub two is considered a legacy format. It is outdated, and it should not be used, and there's not really any reason to use 2.0 anymore. E-pub two was the first major revision of the e-pub standard, and it offers for text to be presented in a somewhat accessible way. So it's great for what it was, and it worked at the time. E-pub two is based on a legacy standard of HTML, which means there is highly limited accessibility support. It doesn't have the ability to offer the accessibility features that we enjoy even on websites to date, let alone in the electronic publishing industry. So E-pub three, because it's based on HTML five, first of all, is much more scalable. It has many more options for styling text and for laying out books, but it also includes the wealth of accessibility that comes with today's modern websites. So things like aria roles and semantic inflection are much easier to indicate in E-pub three, and they can be done in a standard that is understood by all of today's modern screen readers because it's the same coding that's being used for websites. So any advances that are made either on the internet or the internet being used by people with disabilities immediately translates to electronic publishing when you use E-pub three. Aria roles are a way of identifying content in an unambiguous way to assistive technology. So we talked a little bit about headings and how to make those headings exposed to assistive technology. So it knows, okay, this is a level two heading, this is fairly important. There are more ambiguous components that appear in today's publishing. So if you have an image, there isn't really a way in E-pub two to indicate whether that image is important or not. In E-pub three, we can assign an aria role to that image that tells assistive technology, you know what, this image is decorative, you can just ignore it, and it will. Assistive technology skips over that image when it's tagged as decorative and completely ignores it. And that is one of the really cool things about E-pub three, and it's only available in E-pub three. E-pub three supports media overlays. So publishers who would like to offer narration for their book have the ability to synchronize that narration with the text. That's really easy to do in E-pub three. Multimedia can have text or audio descriptions. It's possible to have different versions of your book, particularly accessible content, for instance, that can be expanded in E-pub three. There are semantics that can be attached to other elements that identify what those sections are to all E-readers. So for instance, the table of contents or the start of reading position, different sections in the book can all be indicated with what they call E-pub type semantics, and those are unique to E-pub three. So the benefits to using a modern version of E-pub are huge for accessibility, but there are many really cool features that are available to the mainstream market that are of tremendous interest to all readers as well. Making a version three E-pub is as easy as making a version two E-pub. So as an example, if you're using InDesign and you choose to export your project to an E-pub, you can just pull down the version box and set it to version three instead of version two. That's all you have to do. So it's just as easy, but it makes a huge difference for accessibility. It's very important when producing an E-pub three to ensure it's backward compatible. There was a lot of pushback offered a few years ago when publishers first started introducing E-pub three. Vendors or consumers would try it on their legacy device and report this doesn't work, we don't want this, go back to E-pub two. And the reason for that is really simple. Publishers weren't offering a backwards compatible E-pub three. It's really easy to do. E-readers are designed to ignore codes they don't understand. So the bottom line is E-pub threes can be read by legacy readers who haven't been given the E-pub three semantic, except for one important difference. E-pub three uses a completely different navigation file than version two E-pubs. However, you can include both. So if when you produce your E-pub three, you ensure you have both an E-pub three and an E-pub two navigation file, in almost all cases your E-pub three is backwards compatible with legacy readers and the pushback goes away.