Transcript: Audiobooks for everyone: An accessibility-first approach - Tech Forum 2025

Join us for a behind-the-scenes look at audiobook production with a focus on accessibility. Cassie Smyth, Audiobooks Manager at ECW Press, will share insights into ECW’s approach to creating born-accessible audiobooks, how their workflows are structured, what they focus on, and what’s next for their team. Whether you’re looking to expand into audiobooks or want to learn from a publisher leading the way in accessible audiobook production, this session is for you.

Link to presentation recording and slides: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/audiobooks-for-everyone-an-accessibility-first-approach/

Presented by BookNet Canada on September 11, 2025, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.

1. Adaobi: Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's Tech Forum session. I'm
Adaobi Nnaobi, the Marketing and Research Associate at BookNet. Welcome to Audiobooks
for everyone: An accessibility-first approach.
Before we get started, BookNet Canada acknowledges that its operations are remote and our
colleagues contribute their work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the
Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi'kmaq, the Ojibwa of Fort
William First Nation, the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, which includes the
Ojibwa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomie, and the Métis, the original nations and peoples of
the lands we now call Beeton, Brampton, Guelph, Halifax, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vaughan,
and Windsor.
We encourage you to visit the native-land.ca website to learn more about the peoples whose
lands you're joining from today. Moreover, BookNet endorses the Calls to Action from the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and supports an ongoing shift from
gatekeeping to spacemaking in the book industry. The book industry has long been an
industry of gatekeeping. Anyone who works at any stage of the book supply chain carries a
responsibility to serve readers by publishing, promoting, and supplying works that represent
the wide extent of human experiences and identities in all of that complicated
intersectionality. We at BookNet are committed to working with our partners in the industry
as we move towards a framework that supports spacemaking, which ensures that
marginalised creators and professionals all have the opportunity to contribute, work, and
lead.
If during the presentation you have questions, please use the Q&A panel found in the bottom
menu. Now let me introduce our speaker. Cassie Smyth is the Audiobooks Manager at ECW
Press. In her role, she has managed the production of more than 350 audiobooks, all by
Canadian publishers and authors, and narrated by Canadian voice talent. She holds a BA in
English, minor in business from Carleton University, and a certificate in creative book
publishing from Humber College. Over to you, Cassie.
Cassie: Thanks so much, Adaobi. Thanks for having me. Thank you, everyone, for coming
to my webinar, Audiobooks for everyone: An accessibility-first approach. My name is Cassie
Smyth, and I am the Audiobooks Manager at ECW Press. I have been in this role for the last
four and a half years, and in this role I specifically work on audiobook production, meaning
everything from final pages of a manuscript to final files of an audiobook. Unfortunately, I'm
not able to speak to distribution or metadata in its entirety, but if you have any questions,
please feel free to contact me after the presentation and I'd be happy to consult with my
colleagues about anything to do with that.
So, to get started, our agenda today, we will be going over an overview of ECW Press'
audiobook program and how we got to where we are today. Then I'm going to do a deep dive
into accessibility best practices and considerations when it comes to audiobook production.
And to round it all off, I'm then going to do a quick overview of CELA's Accessible
Commercial Audiobooks Research Project, which I had the pleasure of being a part of their

2. advisory committee last year and overseeing their work. The full report will be available as
part of the links after this Tech Forum today.
To give a little bit of background about ECW's audiobook program, we got into this work in
2015. We are turning 51 years old this year, but we've been in the audiobook game for about
10 years. And when we first delved into this sphere, it was because our co-publisher, David
Caron, looked around at the audiobook industry in Canada and what other Canadian
publishers were doing and realised that almost all of us were licencing out to American
audiobook publishers or just not creating audiobooks to start with.
And we have so many wonderful studios in Canada. We have such fantastic vocal talent. We
have fantastic directors. We have such a wealth of talent north of the border. And why
weren't we taking advantage of it? And so in the 10 years since then, very exciting that we're
coming up on 10 years of this audiobook work, we have produced over 650 audiobooks.
That's an average of 65 per year. We're very proud of it. Now, this isn't saying that we
produced 65 audiobooks each and every year. We have had busy years and we have had less
busy years. At our peak, whenever the Canada Book Fund was offering the audiobooks
funding, we were producing north of 120 audiobooks each year. Thank you, Cathy. But now
we're maybe more between 30 and 50, but we're still going strong. We're still really
dedicated to having audiobook representation for our books and our client publishers' books,
and we think this is really important work to continue on and to create this community of
audiobooks in Canada.
As I mentioned, we work with client publishers at ECW on... Thank you so much, Jenny. It's
so nice you're here. But we work with several different Canadian publishers. It's not just
ECW's own frontlist titles. As you'll notice, I mentioned we do 120-plus audiobooks some
years in production. At ECW, we publish around 50 titles as our frontlist each year, so that
math simply does not work. We also have our Bespeak Audio Editions imprint in which we
acquire the audio licence from other Canadian publishers to produce those audiobooks under
this imprint. You'll know Arsenal Pulp Press' Butter Honey Pig Bread, or Invisible books,
The Clarion. We produce both of these under our Bespeak imprint.
As for our client publishers, we've been really lucky to form great relationships with a bunch
of Canadian publishers. Here is just a small selection of the publishers that we've worked
with, but I just wanted to grab these to kind of demonstrate the variety of material that we've
had the pleasure to work on. We've worked with Between the Lines and University of Regina
Press, McGill-Queen's University Press, Goose Lane, University of Manitoba Press,
Vehicule, all of these different publishers offering all of these different books, different
genres, different accessible material to work with. So, we've really run the gamut of
everything and anything that we can possibly encounter in the audiobooks sphere and figured
out how to adapt that to audio in a way that is accessible and enjoyable.
So, I'm going to dive into audiobook accessibility best practices next. I've divvied this up into
five bits just because it seems the best way to kind of dive into each and every one of these
different silos. We're going to talk about adapting books to accessible audiobooks and the
kinds of books that need these accessibility considerations more than others. Then we'll dive
into different types of accessible material. So, we're talking footnotes, endnotes,

3. bibliographies, works cited, images, graphs, tables, figures and so on, all of those and how
we take those and present them in audio in a way that is accessible.
Then I'll touch briefly on supplemental PDFs and what that can mean whenever you're
distributing an audiobook. You can prepare that to go along with your files. Then of course
I'll touch on AI a little bit because it is a hot button issue that we are just delving more and
more into every single day it seems. Then I will touch on ACX standards which is a little bit
more technical and how to enhance navigability in very simple ways for your audiobook.
Okay so first step is to start with the audiobook. So, I'm going to start with the audiobook in
very simple ways for your audiobook. Okay so first up we have adapting books to accessible
audiobooks. While audiobooks are generally accessible by nature just in the fact that they are
audio so they are easier for those with print disabilities to listen to—and it's great that they
have this medium to hear the book instead of being able to read it from print—it is not
necessarily the case that all books will be made into accessible audiobooks. I've had a few
books that I've read in my personal reading where I've read through the whole thing in audio,
it's been great, and then I pick it up in a store and I realised that there were a bunch of images
throughout that simply were not incorporated into the audiobook. And that's something that,
not that I necessarily would require the accessibility considerations, I would have liked to
have known that they were there so that I could enjoy the full picture of the audiobook.
So, there are certain genres that we find these considerations come more into play with, and
those are children's literature, of course full of images, picture books by nature full of images
by the title itself, then non-fiction where we're dealing with maybe footnotes, endnotes, those
heavy bibliographies, as well as memoirs or business titles. These are more the kinds of
books that you will need to make accessibility considerations for.
So, when I talk about types of accessible material, I'm going to break it down into three
categories that we are typically looking at whenever we go to prepare an audiobook script.
So, first of all we have footnotes and endnotes, then we have images, and then works cited,
bibliography, and references. We can kind of lump them into these three categories in how
we deal with them.
First, I'm going to pull an example from "The Monster in the Mirror by KJ Aiello". This is a
memoir of cultural criticism that connects popular fantasy with our perceptions of mental
illness. It has tons of footnotes in it. And when we were going through the script, we really
wanted to make sure that this information was not lost because it is so integral to the book.
So, what we decided, because the footnotes were more of a bibliographic entry nature, was to
separate them out into a file towards the end of the audiobook so they wouldn't interrupt
listener experience but they were still present in the audiobook.
So, in the main body of the book, the text reads as...
Female Voice 1: Frankenstein's monster is the epitome of speaking something into
existence—abracadabra, I create as I speak. End note 1.

4. Cassie: So, that's how it appears in the audiobook, and then I've pulled a snippet from the
footnotes file at the end of the book for you so you can hear what that would look like
audibly.
Male Voice 1: End notes. Chapter 1 "The Monster in the Mirror." 1 - Julian Sinclair,
"Abracadabra," The Jewish Chronicle, July 5, 2018, www.thejc.com/judaism/jewish-
words/abracadabra-1.466709.
Cassie: So, that is including the footnote as accessible material. Now to address the elephant
in the room, you'll notice that the original narrator, who is the author KJ Aiello, is not the
same as the bibliographic content, and this kind of leads into our conversation about AI that
I'll touch on later. I believe, to my knowledge, that ECW has incorporated AI in their
audiobook, or synthetic voice as some people call it, twice, and this has solely been for
accessibility considerations to record this back matter where a narrator is unable to do so.
For us, it is a matter of, like, we have received recommendations from CELA and from
NNELS that it is more important to have this accessible material in the audiobook than to not
have it. And so we have made informed decisions about how best we can go about this and
still fulfil our requirements to have the accessibility material in the audiobook. And in a case
where a narrator is unable to narrate it themselves, we have opted twice to use a synthetic
voice just for the accessible material, not for the main narrative, not for the main text, but just
to make sure that this accessible material is incorporated and is present in the audiobook.
Okay. Next, I will move on to images. So, what better book, in my opinion, to talk about
images than "Denison Avenue" by Christina Wong and Daniel Innes. We released this in
spring 2023, and it went on to be shortlisted for Canada Reads. We are so proud of it because
of how unique it is. I actually have it here with me today, and you can see it right here. And
for those who don't know or aren't familiar with it, if you open it from one side we have a
novel, we have written text, there's a little bit of variation in how the text is formatted, with
italics or being written out like this, kind of like a poem, but it's just text. It's just text. But if
you flip it over like this, then it's a graphic novel, and you can read it from the entire other
side, so that all of these illustrations are done by Daniel Innes, and all of the text is done by
Christina Wong.
And so we had originally decided not to produce this audiobook, because it's such a daunting
prospect, right, like half the book is images, and how were we going to go about that in a
way that was intriguing and enticing to listeners when so much content is conveyed through
those graphics and through those illustrations by Daniel? They're very beautiful. And we
were approached by CNIB, who had received funding from DCH's image description
programme for accessible audiobooks, EPUBs, and braille versions of graphic novels, and
they asked us if we would be interested in creating an audiobook for "Denison Avenue." And
we said, of course, we love this book. We're very passionate about it.
And so CNIB worked with the authors directly to create image alt text that almost created a
behind-the-scenes experience for audiobook listeners, that you're getting a totally different
experience than people reading the book off the page or reading the e-book. It's got so much
depth of information in it from the author and the illustrator, and we thought this was a really

5. compelling example of how you can adapt images for audio that isn't just plain image alt text
where you're just conveying the facts of the scene. You're creating so much more depth of
meaning and intrigue.
So, I will play the image alt description for you in this audio clip. It is a little bit long, but it
is the image that you see on the top right of my screen on this slide, and you can hear
Christina describe it in her and Daniel's words.
Female Voice 2: The top panel shows a lush garden bordered by a chain-link fence at the
southeast corner of Denison Avenue and Wales Avenue. The vegetables grow taller than the
fence, curling around their wooden supports, hanging sticks, and connecting ropes. Bricks lie
across the length of the garden. The house's facade is made of bricks scored with mortar
lines. A utility pole stands next to the garden in a small bit of grass. A stop sign and street
sign that says Wales Avenue are fixed to it. Just above the street name, it says Kensington in
a whimsical font. Posters are also taped around the bottom of the pole. The sidewalk in front
has a few cracks where some weeds have managed to grow.
The bottom panel centers on two two-and-a-half-story, semi-detached houses with pointed
roofs. 157 and 155 Denison Avenue, nestled amid other two-storey homes. The two houses
are nearly identical in appearance, with turret windows and diamond-shaped porch fences.
Cho Sum hunches over a shopping cart on the porch of 157. The front garden is full and
plentiful, with tall vegetable plants supported by slanted poles and lattices. Poles and sticks
are piled on the right side of the garden next to a bicycle. A concrete path divides the garden
and leads to a chain-link gate, which fences off the yard. Shrubs grow in the garden of 155 at
the foot of a lone tall tree scored with grooves. A utility pole rises out of the sidewalk in front
of the houses. Wrapped around it are a no parking sign with a crossed-out octagon and
another sign that reads "Maximum 30."
Illustrator's Note: This is an homage to the many front-yard Chinese vegetable gardens found
throughout Chinatown and Kensington Market. What Christina and I love about these
gardens is their visibility and their unabashedly resourcefulness, repurposing mop and broom
handles, old pipes, and hockey sticks for makeshift trellises and support, or their use of old
tofu buckets and Styrofoam boxes as planters. They also remind Christina of her own late
grandmother's garden when she was growing up.
Cassie: So, there we have an example of an image description that doesn't have to just be
plain and simple and cut dry. It can be a little bit more illustrative, a little bit more depth of
emotion or heart or feeling to really entice listeners, everyday listeners as well as people who
would need the image alt text.
Next step, and last on the list of these three different types of accessible material, is works
cited, bibliography, and references. For non-fiction and memoirs, there is frequently some
reference back matter for us to contend with. We usually just have this narrated where it
appears in the final pages of the manuscript, so this will be towards the end of the book. And
here is an example from Ruby Smith Diaz's "Searching for Seraphim."
Female Voice 3: Bibliography. Compton, Wayde. "After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing,
and Region." Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010. Matthews, James Skitt (compiler).

6. "Conversations with Khahtsahlano. 1932-1954." Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2022, originally
published by City of Vancouver Archives in 1955. Matthews, James Skitt. "Early Vancouver,
Vol. 4." Vancouver: City of Vancouver, [1944] 2011.
Cassie: As you can hear, this kind of material is very involved to record, with each symbol
having to be narrated. It takes on average two to three times longer to record this kind of
material—this involved HTML links and so on—than it does just your regular narrative text
that you would find in the main body of the audiobook. So, it's very time consuming, but it's
very important to make sure that this is included in the audiobook for accessibility purposes.
Moving on, now to talk about supplemental PDFs. This is an option that not every audiobook
retailer can accommodate, but Audible is one of the ones that I have confirmed, and I believe
that there's a handful of other ones. It's just that I'm not on the distribution side, so I can't
speak to the exact ones, but in some select cases, some retailers will accept a supplemental
PDF to accompany the audiobook files.
And so what this is it's just a PDF. It just has your title of the book, your copyright page, and
then any pages in the book that have images on them. So, you an see from this excerpt of Rik
Emmett's "Ten Telecaster Tales," it has some very beautiful illustrations within it and so
what we've done is just strip out those images and put them in a PDF. And then these are
included and sent out to Audible and the other retailers that can accommodate or... I can't
speak to them off the top of my head. So that anyone who wants to see the images for
themselves can just download the PDF and look at it. This is not something I would
recommend to replace image alt text. It is simply to complement it. It's just if you want to go
a step further and be a little bit more thorough. You can explore this option as well.
Now moving on to AI and audiobooks. It is such a hot button issue in the audiobook sphere,
and the main topic of concern is obviously if human narrators will eventually be replaced by
synthetic and AI narrators. And let me just say off the hop that that is not something that
we're interested in at ECW Press. We do not believe that a synthetic voice can carry the same
nuance and heart as a human voice does. All of our productions are narrated by human
narrators.
But as we saw earlier, there is a use case for synthetic voices when it comes to specific
scenarios, such as if a narrator is unavailable to narrate that back matter. Let's say a
bibliography where it's 20 pages of HTML or HTTP links, apologies, or really dense
bibliographic entries. If they're not available for that, and the option is either not including
that and not having that accessibility, or including it with a synthetic voice, we opt to include
it for accessibility purposes, and AI is the way that we can get about this. As I mentioned,
we've only done this on two occasions, but every other occasion we've had the same material
narrated by a human narrator. It's nice that we're able to have a backup if all else fails and we
don't have that narrator available to narrate the accessible material, but our first choice is
always to have everything narrated by a human narrator.
The benefits, of course, as I mentioned on the last, or two slides ago, with "Searching for
Seraphim," is that material is very dense to record. It's a lot of effort for the human narrator,
it's really time-consuming, it takes maybe two to three times as long as just normal text in the

7. studio to record that. That's two to three times more of the narrator's time, two to three times
more of the studio time, and so I can see an argument where synthetic voice for accessible
material is an affordable option. It's an interesting argument to make. It's interesting to see
where our future might lead with this, but at present, ECW is firmly on the side of human
creators.
Moving on to ACX standards. For those who don't know, ACX stands for Audiobook
Creation Exchange. This is a platform developed by Audible that facilitates the creation and
distribution of audiobooks. Most often they act as a marketplace where authors can find
narrators and studios that will produce their audiobooks. As such, ACX has created technical
standards for audiobooks that have now been adopted industry-wide.
And this gets a little bit technical, but please bear with me on the next slide. We just have a
few technical specifications. These include an opening and closing credits file. We want to
say like, "This is the title of the audiobook. It's written by this person. It's narrated by this
person in the first file," so that people know what they're getting into. And we also want
closing credits that gives credit where credit is due for the author, that acknowledges the
copyright, and lets the listener know that the audiobook is coming to an end.
Audible and other retailers also ask for a retail sample to be submitted. This is just usually
the first chapter. Each file should be no longer than 120 minutes and split longer sections into
separate files. That just means you cut it at an appropriate time, you say, "You just take the
chapter title again, put it in there, and then put a continued or something like that," and then
start up the remaining bits of the chapter.
You should include one section or chapter per file, meaning we're not putting three chapters
in one file. We don't want the listener to get confused. We should label files with a chapter or
section title, which I'll dive into a little bit more on the next slide. Files, this is really
technical, should be in mono or stereo. Volume should be at a certain level, peak levels
should be at a certain level, noise floor should be at a certain level, and the room tone should
be less than five seconds at any time. This just means there should be no pauses longer than
five seconds.
So, enhancing navigability, what we do at ECW Press, and what's the best practice overall in
the industry, is to provide a manifest to retailers that allows end users to better navigate the
audiobook.
So, you'll see on the right where it says no manifest, this is an example of an audiobook
where a manifest was not provided. So, you'll see it just shows up Chapter 1, Chapter 2,
Chapter 3, etc., and these are all, as you can see on the left, different files. One's the opening
credit, the next is the epigraph, and then we have, one, Papyrus, two, Herculaneum, and so
on. We want to make sure that listeners navigating the audiobook know where they are at
any given time, can jump from a file to another file, especially, like, let's say in non-fiction.
This is an example from a fiction title, but let's say a non-fiction, a collection of essays. If
someone wants to jump from one specific essay to another one that is labelled and piques
their interest, we want them to know where those files are and to be able to do that. So, this is
just a very simple way that we can make sure that listeners can get where they want to go.

8. Okay, moving on, and the last thing I'll talk about today is CELA's Accessible Commercial
Audiobooks Research Report. So, last year CELA, the Centre for Equitable Library Access,
applied to and received a grant from Accessibility Standards Canada to research commercial
audiobooks in Canada and how they can be standardised and made accessible across the
board. This resulted in the following research project and findings. I had the honour to serve
on the advisory committee for this project and watch the development of this project through
its many stages.
So, a little bit of background. CELA created the Commercial Audiobooks Research Project
to investigate and address accessibility gaps in the commercial audiobook production for
individuals with print disabilities. While digital publishing has advanced accessibility,
particularly with e-books, commercial audiobooks still lack standardised accessibility
practices despite being a primary reading format for many. The goal of the research project
was to provide recommendations to commercial audiobook producers and publishers, and
other stakeholders, to improve the accessibility of audiobooks for individuals with print
disabilities. As for the methodology of the research report, CELA consulted scholarly
literature and publishing standards, end users of commercial audiobooks, nonprofit
organisations supporting individuals with print disabilities, and publishers, producers, and
industry stakeholders.
Moving on to some key findings from their report. They found that commercial audiobooks
currently lack standardised accessibility features. Each producer or publisher is kind of
making it up as they go, and not necessarily speaking with each other and talking about the
best ways that we can address accessibility and integrate it into our production workflows.
Many commercial audiobooks omit front and back matter, like I mentioned earlier, leaving
listeners, especially those who rely entirely on audio formats, at a disadvantage in accessing
full content.
As for user habits and preferences, there was a case made for born accessible audiobooks.
This would include shared preferences for accessibility features such as better navigation,
image descriptions, high quality narration, and metadata, enhancing usability for everyone by
implementing features like navigable tables of contents, properly structured chapters, and
descriptions for images. And there was a demand for customised experiences tailored to each
user, no matter what their needs may be.
The audiobook industry needs greater collaboration on accessibility. Like I mentioned, a lot
of us are just doing the best we can with what we know and what feedback we get, but we
would do much better to get everyone in a room and talk about how we can best address the
needs of our listeners going forward.
As for the report, they had some key findings and key recommendations for publishers and
producers. The first key recommendations across the board for different groups, I'll say, but
I'll start with publishers and producers. They recommend that all book elements are included
in the audiobook, and to avoid abridgment. They recommended providing supplemental
materials, whether that be in the supplemental PDF that I mentioned earlier or otherwise, to
use clear, well-paced narration with explicit cues for footnotes, image descriptions, and

9. headings, and to provide a detailed, accessible table of contents using track lists and named
files meaningfully, harkening back to our manifest that we talked about earlier.
Then they provided recommendations for audiobook platforms and libraries. To build
platforms that support end-to-end accessibility, including voice commands and customisable
settings. To develop reading technologies that allow customisation and support further
accessibility features and flexibility. To prioritise accessibility in the procurement of digital
resources. To offer diverse audiobook collections and provide training on digital literacy and
accessible services.
And last, we have some industry-wide recommendations. To explore advanced features like
AI-driven bookmarking, summarisation, and voice-activated commands. To develop and
adopt common accessibility metadata and standards. To explore technological solutions to
allow readers to customise their experience. To work towards allowing synchronised text and
audiobooks to enhance compatibility with assistive tools and respond to reader preferences
generally.
If you're interested in reading more about their research project, they have a very
comprehensive report that goes into their methodology, into their findings, and really dives
into everyone that they spoke with and compiles all of their research beautifully. That will
be... Yeah, Natalie just linked it in the chat that everyone can go read about it in their own
time.
And that is it for me today. Thank you so much for your attention. I really appreciate you
being here and listening. I hope this was a helpful discussion of accessibility and audiobooks
that you can integrate into your company practices going forward.
Adaobi: Thanks for a very informative presentation, Cassie. Thanks so much, Adaobi. Yeah,
it's time for the Q&As portion of the session. So, we have quite a bit of questions from the
chat and the Q&A box. So, I'm going to start with the first one: what is the user experience
like for listeners with footnotes or endnotes? Specifically, how do listeners jump from the
flow of the text to the endnote content if endnotes are placed after the chapter or at the end of
the book?
Cassie: So, this is one of those instances where we are a little bit siloed between producers,
distributors, and platforms that listeners would listen on. This is something that we would
rely on the technology of a platform to be able to do, and they have not created that yet
where we're able to jump to a certain bookmark in an audiobook. I believe the technology
exists in e-book. I'm sorry, I don't work in e-book, so that's not something I can speak to
entirely, but there's no way to link from one place in an audiobook to another where you can
just jump automatically. Sadly, that accessibility does not exist yet so the best we can do is
just to include it all, and not hope for the best but include it all for accessibility purposes. It is
not a perfect system yet. There are still so many developments to be made in audiobooks.
This is just one where we're waiting for the technology to catch up.
Adaobi: Okay, next question: "Cassie, how are you able to decide how much emotional
description to add to the image descriptions? Often I'm asked to just describe the image
without the emotionally descriptive additions."

10. Cassie: I think it depends on the book, depends on the author, depends on the publisher.
Yeah, it depends on a whole bunch of factors. I think each and every production, I always
say in my line of work, every book is different. We've got a different narrator, different
director, different studio, different this, different that. Every situation is entirely unique. So, I
think it's a real case-by-case basis, which I know is not a very helpful answer, but I think
asking those key questions and communicating with the producer or the publisher or
whoever you're working with could be helpful to kind of suss out whether that might be an
appropriate situation to add a little bit more emotion or a little bit more depth to it.
Adaobi: Yeah. You're right, and I think it's also different depending on the type of book
you're working with.
Cassie: Exactly.
Adaobi: Children's book versus memoir.
Cassie: Yeah, or versus business book where you're describing a table or figures or
something.
Adaobi: Yeah. "We work a lot with scholarly books. How would you handle charts and
tables?"
Cassie: Alt text 100%. It depends on where... First of all, I would make sure that the
paragraphs preceding and afterwards... Okay, let me backtrack, sorry. That the figure does
not appear in the middle of a paragraph, that you want to insert the alt text for it between
paragraphs so you don't interrupt flow for the listener in the middle of a sentence. You really
want to make sure that it fits in there nicely. Alt text is the way to do it. We've worked on
"The Rule of 30" by Frederick Vettese, and it's complicated alt text to describe a graph to
someone audibly, but it can be done. It's just tough. But I would say that a supplemental PDF
can go a long way for books like that, as the chat pointed out, so thank you for that.
Adaobi: Yeah, and in the supplemental PDF, like you said, alt text could also be required.
Cassie: Yes. Yeah, both of them and you're golden. One or the other, better have image alt
text than a supplemental PDF. I would say. Supplemental PDF is just a helping hand to the
alt text.
Adaobi: Yes. "Is the manifest included within the metadata, or is it a separate file like a CSV
that accompanies the audio files?"
Cassie: Unfortunately, my limited understanding of distribution, because my colleague
Jessica Albert does such fantastic work. I don't know off the top of my head, but I do know
that it's something that I prepare and I send to her that is separate from the regular metadata. I
don't know if she then incorporates it into the metadata, but I do know that the form I send to
her is separate.
Adaobi: Okay. "With things like picture books, would you include cover descriptions, often
a copy of an interior illustration, and more boring stuff like the copyright page?"

11. Cassie: So, the copyright can just be put in the end credits. Generally, you can just say, "This
book was written by this person. Copyright is held by this person," who the illustrator is, etc.
So, the copyright is quite straightforward, and that goes at the end of the book. It doesn't have
to go at the beginning, especially if we have kids listening to it. They'll probably get
distracted and veer off if the copyright is right at the top of the book.
As for the cover, it's totally up to the publisher, I would say. We have had some productions
where a publisher has wanted us to include the cover art description and the interior pages.
We have had some where the cover art is its own creature and they don't incorporate it. I
think it's good for accessibility, but also it's not something that we do as a regular practice. I
don't think it hurts, let's put it that way.
Adaobi: "Read synthetic voice for bibliographic text. This is a great idea for text that is
liable to have errors in the read, for example long strings of numbers, symbols, etc. What do
you use to create your synthetic voice?"
Cassie: Oh, we've used two companies. And like I said, we've done this twice, so I don't have
a reliable one to refer you to. I want to say that we used Speechki the first time, and then we
worked with some company from Quebec, I can't remember, for the second time. Whoever
this is, if you email me afterwards, my email is up on the PowerPoint screen. I'll track that
down and I can get that information for you.
Adaobi: Great. Another question asks: "I've produced accessible audiobooks before and had
to sort through different standards set by NNELS, CELA and CNIB. Do you see CELA
standards becoming the more dominant ones?"
Cassie: Our standards and best practices have been developed under guidance of CELA and
NNELS and CNIB. I think how we've begun to go about things kind of incorporates
everything from all of them, and I like to think makes everyone happy. I don't see one of
them as the leader in it, and that their word is gospel and you should just refer to one of them.
I think to refer to all of them and to try and make each organisation happy is to make the
most accessible possible audiobook.
Adaobi: That makes sense. Basically, follow all the guidelines.
Cassie: Yeah, there's a lot of guidelines, believe me.
Adaobi: Yeah. "What can I include in my table of contents to add value for the listener?"
Cassie: Okay, could I get a little clarification on if this is a narrated table of contents, or if it's
like the table of contents as would appear in Audible or Hoopla or something like that?
Adaobi: Let's see if they put in the comments to clarify.
Cassie: I only ask just because we don't typically narrate table of contents in our audiobooks.
But when it comes to the manifest, which I would also refer to myself as a table of contents,
basically you just want to use those chapter headings as they would appear in your
manuscript of your book. So, if you had chapter one, "It All Begins," you would want to

12. include all of that in the table of contents as it would appear on the listener's platform so they
can see that.
Adaobi: Okay, and those are all our questions. Thank you again so much for joining us
today, Cassie.
Cassie: Thank you for having me.
Adaobi: Yes, we loved having you. Before we go, we'd love it if you could provide feedback
on this session. We'll drop a link to the survey in the chat. Please take a couple of minutes to
fill it out. We'll also be emailing you a link to a recording of the session as soon as it's
available. To our attendees, we invite you to join our upcoming session, “Ready set go: Pre-
fall sales trends and data-driven insights”, scheduled for September 23rd. Find information
about all upcoming events and recordings of previous sessions on our website,
bntechforum.ca. Lastly, we'd like to thank the Department of Canadian Heritage for their
support through the Canada Book Fund. And thanks to you all for attending.