 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 slight impairment, so I can read print just fine. It's just reading print and understanding print are two very different things. Images can appear pretty much anywhere in an e-book, starting with the cover and working through the content. So the cover of an e-book is always set in an image, which is perfectly fine. But right at the very beginning, we have an option to include alternative text. So images move through the narrative. They complement the text. They can be used to illustrate a point. There might be an author photo at the end of the book. They can pretty much appear throughout the book and anywhere in the text. So a screen reader has no ability to interpret or describe an image. The best a screen reader can do when you come to an image is, say, image or graphic. That's all it says. So whenever an image is included in an e-book, there's an opportunity to include a description. And if that description isn't offered, all the screen reader says is image or graphic. All it sees is the tag that references that image and the file name. So for publishers who decide not to include alternative text descriptions for their images, usually an e-reader will simply read out its file name. So that is a good try, except that most file names don't have any meaning whatsoever. So it might just say img46.jpg, which is entirely useless. And what I always stress is it's actually worse than useless because now the screen reader has offered something which is pointless, but it's also broken up the narrative. Those images will appear in between text. They might be set right in the middle of a sentence and described later on in the narrative. So not only was the alternative text not helpful, it totally broke up the flow of the main narrative. Text should never be set as an image. So it's very common for publishers to set the title page of their book as an image so that the text lays out the way they want to and they can have little icons or graphics and that really is strongly discouraged in accessible publishing. There are multiple ways of setting the text up so it looks nice in the book, but as soon as text is being laid out, ultimately that text is available to assistive technology. So if you have text, don't include it as an image. It's really important to set it up as text in the book. Screen readers do a particularly awesome job of narrating tables if they're set up properly as text, so it really is important not to include those as images. Images are completely inaccessible. So even if you have an image of a table and you go to all the effort in the world of describing that table, it's way too much information to take into the text description. It has to be set up as a table with columns and rows and proper text headings in order for a non-traditional reader to make sense of that information. So there are two classifications for pictures. Oftentimes publishers will include in their books what we call decorative images. So these might be the little curly cues at the end of chapters or little decorative swirls or stars that might appear throughout the text to break up the narrative visually so it's not just a wall of text. And those are really nice visually, but they have no bearing on the main narrative. So they're decorative. They don't need to be described. In fact, they should not be described. They should be marked as decorative. The other images that we come to are important ones. So the text might be talking about an antique clock. And then it might have a picture of a clock with a figure caption that indicates this is a clock from the 1880s. That is an important image. The text references it. The figure caption gives more information about it. And the image must appear in the text. So all that's needed is a brief image description of that clock. An image description should convey the important visual elements of an image. So in our example of the grandfather clock, we have the text that's talking about it. We have the figure caption that's giving a little more specific information about it. But that doesn't give the reader an idea of what the clock itself looks like. So things like what it's made of, how tall it is, what color it is, anything that stands out to you when you're looking at the image as interesting or cool or important can be included in that description. Start with the most important element first. This is a wooden antique clock that stands about six feet tall. And then go into any extra detail that you think might be relevant to the reader. Don't describe everything. It's not relevant to the picture necessarily that the clock is sitting on a beige rug. It may not be important that the time show is 317. We don't need to describe every element of the image. We want these image descriptions to be clear and concise. We want them to convey what's important about the image but not overwhelm the reader with useless detail. We want to try to follow the style that the book was written in. So if it's a children's book, we don't want to be using huge words. We want to try to describe the image in a way that it complements and flows with the text. We don't really want it to stand out.