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This videos to give you a little more information about a service called Bookshare as well as to
demonstrate some of the basic reader features in action.
so I'm on the book share home page right now. The website is www.bookshare.org.
Bookshare as a service that provides digital accessible books. They have a free membership for students with disabilities.
If you want information on their membership options and process, from the main page go to the "membership" tab...
and then select "membership overview".
Bookshare has an online catalog where you can look up and download books. They have more information on
how to do both in the "getting started" tab at the top of the page.
So from "getting started" I'm going to select "getting started overview"
In here, you can see links on how to find books, how to download books, how to read books, and also a link for reading tools.
that's where we're going to focus today.
One of the really nice things about Bookshare that they offer free reading tools for their books
So I just clicked on the "reading tools" link and it's taking me to the page where it has more information about the
free readers for Bookshare members. The one that I like the best
is "Read:OutLoud".
It's a self voicing reader with quite a few voice options if you download the extra "acapela" voices.
So on this page if we scroll down a little bit,
we'll see that there's a header called "add on high quality voices - available for Read:OutLoud and Victor Reader Soft only".
So we're going to open up Read:OutLoud now so that I can show you a few of the basic features.
and once you have Read:OutLoud open,
you are going to be prompted to log in. I've already logged in to Bookshare, you can see that it's welcoming me to Bookshare...
but we also need to load up a book. The way that I normally do that is by clicking on "File"...
and then "Open". There are other options for how to open books,
and you can get a little more information about that from the Bookshare website, but this is the one that works best for me.
This is gonna take you to "my documents"
Whenever you download a book from Bookshare, it comes as a zipped file
which you need to unzip, and then put into a document folder where you can easily find it later.
So here's the first page of my book, which is "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, '72" by Hunter S. Thompson....
and I'm gonna use this to demonstrate a few of the basic reading features. So the first one is that you
can have the Bookshare reader read out loud to you.
You can either do that by clicking on the speaker tab in the top toolbar...
[Computer] authors note. Dawn is coming coming up in San Francisco now, 6:09 AM.
[Narrator] You can also use a keyboard shortcut, and that's gonna be control + t in Windows
[Computer] Dawn is coming up in San Francisco now, 6:09 AM
You can also change the voice settings, either through the keyboard shortcut control + / ...or...
from "Speech" which is in the top menu items.
Under "Speech", I'm going to select "voice settings"
and this is where I can choose the voice that I want to hear my text read in
and I can also control the volume, the pitch, and the rate
So I'm going to press control + t again to make it start reading now with my new settings.
[Computer] Inn, out here at the far end of Geary Street: this is the end of the line, for buses and everything else, the western edge of America.
[Narrator] You can also change the e-text style
so there's a link called "eText Style" and right now it defaults to a style called "daisy", but if I click this drop down menu
I can pick a couple of different themes. So you can do large black text on a white background
which enlarges the size of the text.
You can also do a contrast setting, so either large white text on black...
or large yellow text on black.
You can also change the text size through the "Text" item at the top menu bar.
This also has a keyboard shortcut which is control + ]
And that's it for the basic functions of Read:OutLoud Bookshare edition.
I hope you found this helpful.