Testing - InDesign Tutorial

- [Teacher] When it comes to testing your ebook content for accessibility, nothing can compare with having a print disabled reader consume your content. Without question, the gold standard of ebook QA in this regard is to hand an ebook over to a blind or a dyslexic reader and let them provide feedback. I have worked with organizations like NNELS, the National Network for Equitable Library Access, they're in British Columbia, who privilege hiring readers with visual impairments to support their work of remediating ebooks. Testing from this specific consumer-based point of view is not patronizing, it's practical. If a reader with dyslexia can manipulate your content to read it successfully, then you can go home. If a screen reader works seamlessly for a blind or low vision reader, then you know your work flow is successful and that you are reaching all corners of the marketplace. Simply put, it's difficult to understand what needs to happen to make content truly accessible, in a useful way, until you have an understanding of the context in which content will be used and have tried it yourself. This is a quote from Jean Kaplansky, an e-production old timer who works at Deque Systems now. The process will take a little self educating. It is best done by accessibility experts, and it's worth hiring someone to test your ebooks thoroughly. It's also a revelation to go through the process of listening to a screen reader voice your content. I highly recommend that you do it regularly. It will show you how visual the devices and desktops we use are designed. There are a number of ways to do some testing. I frequently test my content using VoiceOver on an iPhone. JAWS, the priciest of the lot, is the industry standard. NVDA is a donation wear screen reader. Both JAWS and NVDA are Windows only screen readers, just FYI. NaturalReader is an iOS app. I'm gonna show you how the ebook we have been looking at through this course sounds in VitalSource Bookshelf, a reading system designed for students. VitalSource Bookshelf is a free download. Users need to set up an account, but it's easy to use and a good place to do your testing. It has a read aloud function built in. Let's hear what Peter Pan sounds like. This is the VitalSource interface. There's one book in here. The ebook is on the desktop, and if I right click that, I can go down to Open with and choose VitalSource Bookshelf. I already have it in this software, so I'm just gonna open it. There is a volume button down here. This is actually the read aloud button. When I click it, some options come up: Play, fast forward, and rewind. Also some settings, let's have a quick look at that. You can adjust the reading speed, and you can click to read the alt text. This is gonna be really useful for our demo purposes today. So I'm gonna click play. - [VitalSource] Title Page: Peter Pan, by J. M. Barrie. Published by Pretend Books, List of Illustrations, Illustration One. - [Teacher] If you remember, this title page is a piece of artwork that I made into one image and the background to sort of maintain the typography. So what it read there was the alt text that I built into that image. Let's go through and listen to chapter one. If you highlight something, a pop up window comes up so you can have highlights, et cetera, and at the bottom, there is a Read aloud from here button. That's what I'm gonna opt for here. - [VitalSource] Chapter One, Peter Breaks Through. All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old - [Teacher] What you're hearing is obviously and clearly a straightforward reading. If you notice there are pauses after full stops or periods. There are smaller pauses after a comma. There will be a larger pause at this section break down here. What I wanna do right now is to scroll down to that piece of french that I had, it's over here, and let you hear what that sounds like. - [VitalSource] Chief one. J'aime le chocolat. She was a lovely lady. - [Teacher] Not perfect, but pretty good. It voiced le chocolat almost accurately. It didn't know what to do with J apostrophe aime. It didn't pronounce it as J'aime, which would have been correct, but, not horrible. Let's go up to here and hear what this image sounds like. - [VitalSource] To die will be an awfully big adventure. Line art. Captain Hook and Peter Pan from 1911 edition. Illustration One. Caption Hook by F. D. Bedford, 1911. - [Teacher] So this gives you a sense of what that all sounds like. I strongly recommend that you check your ebooks in something like this regularly. Just open it up an app like VitalSource Bookshelf and read through a chapter or two, and see what it's tripping up on, and see what's happening seamlessly, and just listen to that experience, and see what other kinds of readers of your content are seeing. The other thing I wanna point out is advocacy. It's a great idea to have someone in-house whose function is to act as an accessibility advocate or to raise awareness of accessibility issues. A good example of this is the ebook team at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. They stage things like Lunch and Learn for their colleagues, including things like demonstrating what reading ebooks via VoiceOver looks like. This kind of in-house advocacy is what will push substantive change in the digital publishing world. Consider taking the things that you've learned here and spreading them to your organizations. Don't skip this critical step in the ebook development process. Testing for accessibility is key to understanding how the full breadth of your readership consumes content. This kind of QA is a teeny, tiny baby step toward seeing how people with print disabilities read ebooks.