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00:00Hi, yeah, my name is Emma Steele and I am head of Every Cherry, which is a new publishing house for people to enjoy accessible reading.
00:14And where did Every Cherry come from? So what's the story behind the company?
00:19So I was a teacher in specialist education. So I worked with different children over about 17 years with varying special educational needs and disabilities.
00:33My main specialism was English. So I taught English and media mainly, and I grew in frustration with the fact that there was very little accessible reading out there for my students.
00:49So I would adapt that book into lots of different accessible versions, so that maybe to make it easier to read, symbolised books or symbolised accessible formats and even sensory.
01:04And I would just do that in the classroom as part of my teaching and to make sure that reading could be fun and accessible for the students.
01:12But then I met with Sanji, who is a publisher at Sweet Cherry Publishing, and he realised that I was doing this and actually I am not the only person or the only teacher doing this.
01:26It's happening a lot across the country to make sure that reading is accessible. People are adapting books within the school to enable that to happen.
01:37Basically, I've set up a section of Sweet Cherry Publishing that specialises in breaking down the barriers to reading. And because of its success, it's now it's formed into its own business.
01:52Can you take me a little bit through your design process? So what is sort of different about how you design and create these books?
01:59So we've got three specific ranges that are all designed in different ways, but also all aim to help a reader.
02:08This is what a spread might look like in the easier range. So you've got the dyslexia friendly font on this side and then you've got an illustration which gives a clue as to what's written here.
02:21Other key features in the easier as well is every book has a page number. When I was teaching, a lot of the time some books might cover the page number with an illustration.
02:34But for somebody who thinks really literally, if you're asked to turn to page 10, but there's an illustration covering the number, it can be really, really hard to understand.
02:43So we've made sure we've got that. And then we've also got little icons to signpost that this book is Frankenstein and each icon is different depending on the book.
02:52The second range is the symbolised range, and this range seems to be the one that people are finding most innovative, I think.
03:00A lot of people communicate with symbols. So if somebody has a communication difficulty, they might have a device that uses symbols to help them to communicate and they'll press a symbol and it will speak for them.
03:15But what had shocked me was that there were no books using these symbols that were printed that people could buy in a really good quality format.
03:25So that's what we've created. Then the final range is the stories for your senses range. What we do if you open the book, there's a free soundscape and a free audiobook.
03:38But then what you're asked to do or the readers asked to do is to collect what they need to read the story.
03:44So depending on where you're going in the book, and this is a day at the beach, you can collect different items that you might need like sun cream, sand, towel, water.
03:55Most of these things you could easily find at home, you could actually do on the beach or they're affordable items.
04:03And then as you read the book at the bottom here, there's a little flash and it tells you to shine the torch or to taste your ice lolly.
04:16And the idea being that there's a sensory activity linked to each spread of the book so that a carer could read the book, a parent could read the book, but then the person being read to can also use a sensory experience.
04:30So it's great for people with profound and multiple learning disabilities, but also really good for preschool children that really want that fun aspect of reading as well.
04:41Just briefly, why is it so important to make reading more accessible?
04:48I think everybody, in my opinion, should be able to enter an imaginary world of reading.
04:57So there are so many stories to be told. Lots of amazing books have been written like Frankenstein.
05:05There's so many books that have really shaped our history. They've shaped how we see the world and they might have shaped the way somebody sees something on a personal level.
05:17So there's so many books that I've read and there'll be something in that book that really rings true to me.
05:23And I think to take that away from somebody because they struggle to read at a certain level is really difficult.
05:32And actually books can help people to develop and learn, but they can also be great for mindfulness, great for relaxation, great for so many different things, drama, TV, film, anything.
05:49And I just think that being able to access a book in whichever format best suits that person is magical and everyone should be able to have a choice to read a book in the way that best suits them.