 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 sight impairment, so I can read print just fine. It's just reading print and understanding print are two very different things. Metadata shares information about a document with computers. Metadata appears in almost all documents that you work with on your computer. When you work on a document in Microsoft Word, for instance, Metadata tells other readers who last modified the document and when. In the publishing arena, Metadata is a very important piece not only of the distribution network, but also of the accessibility arena. So things like the title of the book, the author, the publisher, and the copyright date are all included in special classes of Metadata. But when we look at it from an accessibility standpoint, there are also values which can specify how accessible a publication is or some challenges that readers might experience with trying to use that publication. Metadata shares information about your publication with other potential readers as well as the distribution chain. In a world of millions of books, Metadata offers you the chance to set your publication aside from everyone else's. It exposes not only information about the book, but its content to anyone who has interest in that book, anyone who's searching for it, anyone who's archiving it, anyone who's thinking about making it available to their customers or readers. So it distinguishes your EPUB from all the other EPUBs on the planet. So you're looking for a teen book, and then you can add stuff on top of that. So you're looking for a teen book about farming. You're looking for a teen book about farming potatoes. There may be two or three other books about teens farming potatoes, but if your Metadata states that your book has descriptions of all the images, especially all the potatoes, then readers who are blind or low vision are much more likely to purchase your content over any others. There are two types of Metadata, but both are really important pieces of the accessibility puzzle. That's because it's free marketing and great PR. External Metadata is provided in something like the book's ONIX record. So this is a little file that travels through the distribution chain and helps potential readers find your content. You might manage these records with something like CoreSource. Now, older versions of this specification did not support accessibility Metadata, so be sure you're using the latest version of the standard like ONIX 3.0, for example. Now, internal Metadata lives inside your EPUB. This is a series of tags that's read by the user's reading system and provides information about the book they're about to read. So they use these tags to select a book from their bookshelf and decide which one they want to read. When you provide accessibility Metadata here, it tells readers with print disabilities how accessible that content is going to be and how easy it will be to navigate it. Internal Metadata is provided through a series of tags in your book's OPF file. You can edit this just like any other HTML document with your preferred editor of choice. One important thing to keep in mind, these tags have to be specific to one book or at the very most a series of books. So if you find a set of accessibility Metadata online, you need to modify those tags so that they accurately reflect your content. So in summary, Metadata helps you market your books to an audience that will love them. When you use these tags to provide accessibility information, everybody wins.