BARD Low Vision: Downloading and Transferring Book to Cartridge

Hi, I'm Vikki Vaughan. And in today's workshop, we'll download a BARD book to our computer, we'll then transfer our book to an NLS digital talking book cartridge. Throughout the workshop, we'll refer to our storage device as a cartridge, but it's great to know that we can also download books to a USB flash drive.

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 series 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.

In the Search BARD workshop, we selected our book and now we're ready for the next step. We have lots of choices at this point, we can add the book to our wishlist, download it, or view its details. We can also sort the order of our list. We explored book details and sorting the order in the recently added and Search BARD workshops in this series. Let's have a look at adding our book to the wishlist and downloading it to our computer. Finally, we'll transfer it to our cartridge.

Let's say we're interested in a particular book, but don't have time to download it today. This is the perfect opportunity to add the book to our wishlist. We'll use our keyboard shortcut Alt + W for, you guessed it, wishlist. The book will be stored in our wishlist until we're ready to download it to our computer. This is also a great option when we don't have room on our computer, when we're ready to download it, we open our wishlist with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + W.

Our focus is on the first item in our list, All Books and Magazines, moving down the list we see our items broken down into various categories like Audio Books, Audio Magazines, Braille Books and Braille Magazines.

Let's move back up to All Books and Magazines and press Enter to see what's inside. We see our items in a list form. We can either use our arrow keys, or mouse pointer to move through the list. Since we're in advanced mode, we'll see check boxes next to each title, this enables us to check more than one book or magazine at a time. If you'd like more information about advanced and standard mode check out the recently added and most popular workshop in this series.

I think we're ready to download our book. In the Search BARD workshop in this series we searched for and selected a book to download. Let's head back to our search results by pressing Ctrl + S for search. Since we wish to download this book, we selected the book by checking the checkbox next to our title. In our next step, we use the keyboard shortcut Alt + D, for download, to begin the downloading process. We hear a tone as the download proceeds. Voila, our book is now downloaded to our computer and it's ready to be transferred to our cartridge.

Let's return to the main menu by pressing our Escape key. Now, we'll jump to the bookshelf with, you guessed it, Ctrl + B. We'll see a list of the BARD materials own our computer. Let's use our mouse pointer to select the Organize By dropdown box. Here, we see that we can sort our items by type, subject and author. The default is type, such as braille, audio, and read or unread. In today's workshop, we'll sort by type.

This last item in the list, Unread Items, is where we find the items that we've not yet transferred to our cartridge. We select this option and press Enter to open the list of unread items. Let's use our mouse pointer to choose the book we wish to read. It's time to copy our book to the cartridge. We can either select the Copy To Cartridge button, here in the bottom of our window, or use our handy keyboard shortcut Alt + C for copy.

We've opened a window where we're asked to select the drive letter that our cartridge is connected to, let's click on our desired drive and press Enter to begin the transfer. We see a quick progress window, then a dialogue box, which asks if we would like to eject the drive? When we're ready to listen to our book, we press Y for yes, and then disconnect the cartridge from our computer.

We're now ready to connect our cartridge to our digital book player for audio books, or our refreshable braille device for braille titles. Wow, we did it, BARD Express keeps track of all of our BARD materials and makes downloading and transferring a breeze.

In today's workshop, we downloaded and transferred a book using BARD Express. I'm Vikki Vaughn, and I thank you for joining me.