 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 of Nails. 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. It would be very strange to pick up a book and not find a table of contents. So you open it, and one of the very first pages is going to be a listing of all the sections in that book, along with the page numbers that you can find them on. It's like a roadmap. It tells you what you're going to encounter first and what comes after that and what comes after that. And similarly, in an electronic publication, readers are looking for a table of contents for two reasons, really. First to get a feel of how the book is laid out, how the parts and chapters and sections fit together, and secondly, where to find them in the content. So once a reader has started reading a book and they know that they've left up on chapter four, they might move to the table of contents, find chapter five, and move to that place in the book. Anybody really can go back to the table of contents and know what the name of chapter number 17 is or where part two separates the book. So maybe part two separates between 14 and 15. It's really handy for not only readers with print disabilities, but for readers of all kinds. If someone is reading a book visually, they might just flip through the pages until they find the big bold heading that says chapter five and then keep reading from there. Non-traditional readers tend to consume material a little bit differently. So in the case of readers who are blind, skimming through looking for bold text is not only inefficient, it doesn't really work. So we're going to be using a table of contents to find a particular point in the book and jump right to it. So the table of contents becomes a really important navigation tool when skimming through the content for something that you might recognize visually isn't an option. A table of contents, first of all, gives structure to your content. It makes it clear to readers where different sections start and stop. And the best table of contents is have the option to jump right to a section from the table of contents page. So we're hoping here that sections are set up as a link. So they can just move down to chapter five and press Enter if they're on a computer or click if they're on a tablet on that section title to be taken directly to that point in the book. So it really offers some smooth navigation. A navigation file is a computer-readable table of contents for your book. So the table of contents that we've been talking about is a page in your book that everyone can read and interact with. A navigation file is included in your EPUB to give e-readers access to the same material. So when you go into an e-reader, you have what they usually refer to as a table of contents or a list of chapters that you can click on in your e-reader. It shows up the same for all books. So instead of having to use table of contents pages that are set up differently from publisher to publisher, a navigation file gives the e-reader an option to offer a list of chapters in a standard way that their readers are used to. Other than that, it behaves very similarly. It builds a list of chapters in the book from the navigation file that readers can look through and activate to be taken to that point in the book. So a table of contents is for humans to read and a navigation file is for computers to read. If a section isn't included in the navigation file, first of all, a lot of readers won't know that section exists. And secondly, it will be very difficult to navigate to that point in the book. So oftentimes publishers will neglect to include front and or back matter in the navigation file. So the book opens onto the title page, but the e-reader doesn't know where the reader is in the book. The first option in the navigation file might be chapter one. The reader moves to chapter one and immediately skips all the copyright information, the dedication, the description of what the book is about, the table of contents. All that information isn't really accessible if it's not included in the navigation file. Suppose that a chapter or a part is missing from that file. Again, it's entirely possible that a reader could not even know it's there and skip over it. And if they do know it's there, it's really tough to find by scrolling through a bunch of pages looking for the start of a section. It's really important that all sections be referenced so that readers can find them. The table of contents should be set up as a list. And there are a couple of reasons for that. One of them is when screen readers see a list in your book, they will announce how many items there are in it. So they'll say list with 17 items. And if all those are chapters or most of those are chapters, then it gives a really good indication right away how many chapters there are in the book. The navigation file should be presented in the same way. So rather than just including a list of chapters, the navigation file can be structured as a list so that the e-reader can present a really well ordered list of sections in that book. So suppose you have ten chapters and each chapter has a few different sections. The e-reader might show the ten chapters and then have an option to open up the list for chapter four and see all the sections under it. So it makes for smooth, efficient navigation when the navigation file is set up as a properly ordered list.