BARD Low Vision: Browsing BARD's Recently Added and Most Popular Books

Hi, I'm Vikki Vaughan. And in today's workshop, we'll explore a couple of NLS search tools in BARD Express. These tools allow us to browse the BARD library for their most recently added books and their most popular books.

This series is intended for individuals with low vision. We'll use a combination of mouse clicks and keyboard shortcuts. If you use a screen reader, be sure to check out the screen reading version of this workshop on Hadley's website.

Now it's important to note that we must have an active BARD account to use BARD Express. If you'd like to learn more, have a look at the first workshop in this series to learn how to set up your own free account.

We'll start off from our main menu. The focus is on the first button in the menu, the bookshelf. Let's use the keyboard shortcut of Control+ R for recent to select recently added books. We can also select it with our mouse pointer.

A new window opens with a list of the books and magazines that have been added to the BARD collection in the last 10 days. To change the time range, we select the time range combo box. We can see materials that have been added in the last one day, 30 days, or 45 days. Let's use our arrow key to move to the 30 days time range. Each time we select one of the time ranges, we see a notification which informs us that the books have been downloaded to the list for our review. We close this message by either clicking on the Close button or pressing our Enter key.

Let's click on the next button, entitled Subject Filter to open our filter window. I really like this feature. It lets us narrow the results of our search to subjects that interest us. Here, we have a list of all of the subjects in the BARD collection. All of the subjects are selected by default. Let's click on the Uncheck All button.

Now let's have a look at our list of subjects. We use our arrow keys to move through the list, and select only the subjects that look interesting to us. We select the subjects by pressing our Spacebar, or clicking on the checkbox next to each subject. Let's select several subjects from the list. Once we've made our selections, we press the Enter key to create a new list, that includes only our subjects of interest. From here, we arrow through the list to explore BARDS's recently added books in our chosen subject areas.

Let's say we found a book that looks interesting, but we'd like more information. Let's use our keyboard shortcut Alt + B for book, or click on the Book Details button to open the Book Details window. Here we find lots of helpful information, such as title, author, subject area, annotation, narrator, reading time, and format. I particularly like reading the annotation to get a better idea of the theme of the book. I also like to know the reading time in advance.

From here, we have a couple of options. We can download the book, or add it to our wishlist. We either select the desired button, or use our keyboard shortcuts: Alt + D for downloads, downloads our book, while Alt + W for wish, adds it to our wishlist. Let's press the Escape key to move back to our recently added list.

A little side note. Book and magazine titles in BARD Express can be displayed in one of two ways: standard or advanced mode. The standard mode is the default mode. It only allows us to select one book at a time, while the advanced mode allows us to select multiple items from the list. Another difference between the two modes is the way the books are displayed in our list. Here in the standard mode, our book list displays two columns, one with the title of the book, and the other with the author's name.

Now, let's use our keyboard shortcut of Control + L for look to switch to the advanced mode for comparison. As we can see, the advanced mode provides us with loads of details without having to open the Book Details window. We see columns with the title, author, subject, annotation, narrator, and reading time. The advanced mode also has check boxes next to the titles. These check boxes allow us to select more than one book at a time. In this workshop, we're using the standard mode. I'll switch back with Control + L. We'll use the advanced mode in our next workshop: searching BARD.

Back in the main menu, let's move to our next button, Most Popular Books, with Control + D for desirable. Here, we see a list of the books most frequently requested by other BARD users. As with the recently added option, we can filter our search results, add a book to our wishlist, or download it. We can also view the books details, and sort the order of our list.

In today's workshop, we learned about browsing BARD's recently added and most popular books. I hope you'll join us in our next workshop where we'll explore other methods for searching the BARD library to find our favorite books. I'm Vikki Vaughan, and I thank you for joining me.