 Hi, hello, everyone. I'm talking to you today from Montreal in Quebec. My name is Melissa Castillo and I'm an access to disaster for now. I'm also master degree student in political science. My presentation today aimed to give you a better understanding of the reading experience of people with learning disability. And you need to know that I will base mainly this presentation on my own experience as a dyslexic reader. When talking about reading disability, we tend to picture one specific kind of impairment, but in reality it's a wide range of disability and one of those is learning disability. Learning disability that affects reading can include problems with phonological processing, reading fluency or speed, and even reading comprehension. Today, in order to give you an idea of the challenge that represents reading with learning disability, I prepared a small activity. It's a demonstration that aims to simulate what it feels to read as a person who has dyslexia and you need to know that this is not representative of all people with dyslexia and it's only a simulation of the difficulty of reading with dyslexia. A text that is not accessible. So in no case this is representative of like what dyslexic people see. So I have to say that the activity has been designed for regular reader, which is reader without print disability in that case, to give them an insight into print disability. So for reader without print disability, we have provided you a document, a PDF document that contained the official learning definition according to the Learning Disability Association of Canada and the paper contained also some more information about specific and more common learning disability. So we will give you two minutes to read it. For people here who has this presentation who have a print disability, we have provided you a word document that explained textually what the exercise consists of for regular reader and we also provide you with an accessible text version of the learning definition according to the Learning Disability Association of Canada. So I give you two minutes to go read this and then we come back together. Hi, welcome back. So I have like just some questions for you to reflect on the reading of the PDF document we provided you. So first of all, how is your reading? Was it harder than usual? I would expect so. Was it frustrating? And if you did indeed find it harder to read the content, do you think you understood and remember as much the content that if you would have like a normal layout? And I guess my last question is just to reflect how enjoyable or frustrating it would be to read a book in the format that just gave you. So this exercise is designed to simulate the constant need for attention. We have used different funds and all of them have been chosen to be hard to read even for regular reader. So if you find it hard, this is totally normal. That was on purpose. So what happened is the size and the font type change in the middle of sentences. And this made purposefully to make your brain work hard. Your brain actually with the format I gave you constantly need to adapt to the font and size. That helps to simulate the experience of dyslexic reader where the process of reading is more mechanical and less automatic. There are many researchers that define dyslexia as like the difficulty or the incapacity of automatizing reading. So what it means is for somebody who has dyslexia they can understand the content. It's the actual decoding of the letter that is hard. Automaticity is a key feature for skilled reader. So regular reader would read their book and somehow like forget that they are decoding letter and syllables and word. A bit in the same way than when we are walking. We don't think at every step we take. And so this exercise simulates of what it is to have to be focused and concentrate in order to decode the meaning. The reason why this is important is because as we all know human attention is very limited resources. And just imagine if you would need to think at every step you take while walking in order not to fall. It would probably get mentally exhausted pretty fast and you have like way more chance of having a moment of inattention and falling. And in some way it is a bit like that for me when I'm reading. One other example is imagine reading an entire book in the format I gave you. It will be possible to do it. It would probably get like really exhausted and definitely not enjoyable. If you're passionate about literature and you're a reader without pregnancy you probably know the feeling of forgetting the book in front of you and be totally transported in a story. How enjoyable would it be for you to read a book in the format I gave you? Personally I probably would give up on this book and this is the experience of many dyslexic readers that only have access to inaccessible format. So this is important because for literature or academic paper the information is really important and for dyslexic people this need to like always focus on decoding can mean it's harder to access the content. And we want that everybody can access like equally the content and that means finding a way for people who have dyslexia to not have to put all their energy on actually decoding the letter. Okay now let's talk about page layout and the possibility that offer adaptable content. So if you have a text on your computer in the random and really frustrating format I gave you you probably just wish you could change the font type and size to be uniform. You probably almost like imagine just selecting all the text and uniformizing everything. Maybe then you would want to enlarge the line spacing because the text I gave you is pretty cramped. With PDF you can't do that and this is especially why I gave you the text in a PDF format is because it doesn't offer the adaptability necessary to be changed according to your preference and needs. It would be a totally different story if I would have gave you the same content in a flexible and adaptable platform such as words. Just imagine I would have sent you this in words probably some people would have taken the liberty of just selecting everything and changing the font type and adjusting to their preference. So I will just now open with you the possibility that offer words. I choose to show you the possibility of words because most of people know words but you have to know that like a lot of these adaptable feature are available in many accessible e-readers. So let's open the word. Okay now let's open the same content that I gave you inside word. The reason why I opened it word is because it shows you the possibility of an accessible format in a very accessible platform because word is let's say accessible in the sense that it offers the most possibility of changing the layout but we will see but as well like EPUB offer pretty much this very similar feature and possibility to adapt the content. So imagine that I would have sent you this in the word document. It would not be the same problem that if you receive it in a PDF because in a word you can just select all the text and you can choose the font type you like. You can change the font size and you probably would want to remove the bold which make it a bit messy and you probably would want to change the line spacing so it doesn't look like a wall of text and already it's more accessible and I think for regular reader this would be way easier to read. In word and I just want to show you a feature called immersive reader and this what I'm just going to show you now often or available in e-reader reader that reads e-books. So here we have the feature to choose the width of the column so we can choose narrow, moderate, very wide. Often for dyslexic have a very narrow margin helps because there's little word in one line and it is the reading. After there's the possibility to change the background color often it is suggest for people who have dyslexia to use pastel and pale color in the background to reduce the contrast and this feature such as yeah devising by label. I don't use this one myself and this feature which is very important is the read aloud feature. So the read aloud feature allow you to have the computer reading out loud the text. This means that pretty much you don't have any decoding and as a dyslexic you can access directly the content. So let's hear. Okay it goes a bit fast but it is possible to change the speed. Like for instance if you read like a text that you would normally want to read a bit in diagonal you can use like really fast and if you want more precise reading you can slow down the reading so that's here. For reasoning as such learning disabilities are distinct from global intellectual deficiency. Learning disabilities result from impairments in one or more processes related to perceiving. Okay now let's come back to the publishing world. Offering a book in a text format is not exactly an option to the publishing industry however this is why EPUB 3 had been created. So EPUB 3 allowed to add a digital lock on the content while offering the flexibility to adapt the content. So EPUB allow you to format your text in a publishable format without rendering it inaccessible. When I say rendering it inaccessible I refer to the fact that the publisher received the manuscript in the most accessible format pretty much in a text format we seen in Word and it is the publishing process that makes it inaccessible. I say that because we often think as accessible publishing as something difficult or complicated or even mysterious while in fact you can pretty much refer to your doc file your text file as the accessible file. Therefore when we talk about accessible publishing we need to remember that issue is always how to produce a digital book without putting obstacles for people with disability. I really hope this workshop helped you to have a better idea of the experience of people with learning disability and also how EPUB can be a solution in the publishing industry in order to give people with learning disability access to the content on an equal basis. Thank you.