 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. First of all, our goal is for publishers to decide to publish an e-pub. That's the most accessible format out there. Once that decision has been made, there's one other crucial choice, and that is how the content is going to be laid out. Fixed layout has such a neat visual look. You open up the book and your first response is, wow, this is so cool. This looks like a book that I'd pick up from the library or that I'd buy on Amazon. Everything is centered. Everything is lined up. It's set up to fit the particular screen, and it just looks like a regular printed book until you try to interact with it. So when you try to change the color of text against the background, or when you try to set up different margins so you have a different reading view, you suddenly realize that that isn't possible, and suddenly these really cool images become a massive barrier because the way the text is set up to flow around them, that text can't be changed. So it's difficult for everyone to alter that book to whatever reading style they want to use when they're reading it. It's set up for one particular style of reading in regular lighting conditions with regular site, and you can't interact with that book in the reading system of your choice to customize it to how you want to be able to read the material. This is a great choice for books that have really heavy image content and very little text. So it's a really good choice for young children's picture books where it might just be an alphabet book where we have a couple of letters on each page. The text isn't important. It's all about the picture, and it's important for that picture to be positioned in exactly the right place so what little text there is can flow around it. It makes it look like a real book. It's an engaging visual experience. There isn't a lot of accessible content, so we're not terribly concerned about how assistive technology is going to render that content. Where a fixed layout falls down is you can't change it at all. So it's somebody with low vision who wants to increase the size of the text. It's just not possible. There's all sorts of problems that can come from fixed layout. The best choice for accessibility is to have the content presented reflowably. So that means that the text is going to flow from one page to the next. There aren't specific pages that are set up visually, so it's okay for the e-reader to send one page of the print book onto even two or three pages as a reader is scrolling through it. So that style is really useful for all readers. It's easy to change the contrast if a book is being read in bright sunlight or conversely if they're trying to read it in a dark condition. It's easy to enlarge the size of text if the reader is low vision or has a difficult time seeing the screen. And it's easy for that content to be rendered audibly or in braille. As a publisher, when they choose to produce a several hundred page non-fiction book in fixed layout, we have problems because all of the accessibility barriers that were introduced for the children's book that didn't matter suddenly take front and center stage. So yes, we still have pictures that want to be positioned in the same place. Yes, it's nice to have it laid out looking like a real book and you've got the one page presentation. But all of the other opportunities that we had in reflowable layout are no longer available. It's very difficult to change the contrast of how the text appears against the background. It's impossible to enlarge the size of text. We can't even change the font. So for dyslexic readers who appreciate a dyslexic font, that option isn't available. And for readers who are blind, consuming that content is almost impossible. So we're usually going to get it read one word at a time instead of reading sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. It's difficult to find your place. It's almost impossible to navigate. It's sad because the publisher has put all the work into producing an e-book. All the text is there, except it's just barely out of reach because it's so difficult to work through the content. Reflowable content is a different style of publishing entirely. It's more like a Word document. You can change anything that you want. So everybody's reading experience is a little bit different. And the reflowable layout really gives a lot of flexibility in how you can use the book. So there's an image that's presented on the page. And you have some text that is probably going to be around that image. But it's set up so that the text can flow where it needs to. So if you make that text twice the size, it's just going to wrap around that image and then drop down below the image and move on to the next page. And that's fine. The image is going to stay relatively where it should in relation to the text. But the image isn't fixed to a particular point on the screen. So you can change the font. You can change the contrast of how that text is going to appear against the background of your choice. You can make it so that that text is going to flow onto two or three pages if you need to by the time you adjust the margins and change the size of text so that it's a comfortable reading experience. The same is true of assistive technology. In contrast to a fixed layout publication, assistive technology is given the text on a whole. So it can render it in a way that's useful to its reader. So it's presented properly on a Braille page or it's read nicely, audibly. Typically there's much better navigation offered through reflowable content books. So you can find your place. You can go back and review a word or a sentence that was of particular interest. Fixed layout is such a fixed style. It's very difficult to interact with and it's almost impossible to customize. Whereas reflowable is up to the reader's control. So they can customize the text in that book so that they can read it in a comfortable way that's most familiar to them.