BARD Screen Reader: Settings and Preferences

Vikki: Hi, I'm Vikki Vaughan. And in today's workshop, we'll discuss various settings for making BARD Express easier to use. This series is intended for screen reader users. If you prefer to use your mouse, be sure to check out the low vision version of this series on the Hadley 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, check out the first workshop in this series to learn how to set up your own free account. We'll begin in our BARD Express menu bar. It contains several helpful little nuggets.

Screen Reader: Bookshelf, Control + B button.

Vikki: First off is help. We'll open this menu with Alt + H for help.

Screen Reader: Getting started, G.

Vikki: We hear the first item in our help menu, getting started. Today we wanna check out help. We can either Down Arrow to help.

Screen Reader: Check for updates C, help F1.

Vikki: Or use our keyboard shortcut F1 to activate help. This is a special type of help called context sensitive help. Context sensitive means the help is specific to the task we're currently doing. Let's take a deeper dive in this fantastic partner. Imagine we're in our bookshelf, and we're a little confused about the difference between the bookshelf and the wishlist. Lets press Escape to return to our main menu.

Screen Reader: Bookshelf Control + B button.

Vikki: Then use our keyboard shortcut Control + B to open bookshelf.

Screen Reader: Bookshelf organized by type list. All books and magazines count 7107.

Vikki: Let's press our keyboard shortcut F1 to open our context sensitive helper.

Screen Reader: Help for BARD Express. To switch between the contents view and the table of contents, F6. Press Alt F4 to exit help. Bookshelf organizer. Heading level one section three, bookshelf. The bookshelf, the first button on the main menu is used to manage all of the titles on your computer that you have downloaded from BARD Using BARD Express.

Vikki: As we heard a new window opens with loads of information about the bookshelf. Our context sensitive helper can be opened in any part of BARD Express. Whenever we are unsure about a button or menu in BARD Express, F1 is there to quickly answer our questions. When we finished with our help window, we close it by pressing Alt + F4.

Screen Reader: Bookshelf. Bookshelf organized by type list.

Vikki: Let's check out another useful tool in the help menu. We'll press Alt + H to open our dropdown menu.

Screen Reader: Getting started G.

Vikki: Then press K for keyboard shortcuts.

Screen Reader: Help for BARD Express. Keyboard commands heading level one keyboard commands. Keyboard commands, or hotkeys are available for various features and functions of BARD Express. The table below lists some frequently used hotkeys.

Vikki: As we heard we've open a new window with a handy list of many of the BARD Express keyboard shortcuts. This is super helpful for those times when we've forgotten that one shortcut we need to complete a task. Let's close the help window with Alt + F4.

Screen Reader: Bookshelf.

Vikki: The final tool we'll explore today is in our main menu. Let's press Escape to go there now.

Screen Reader: Bookshelf, Control + B button.

Vikki: The preferences button gives us several options to customize BARD Express. Let's jump right to our preferences with our keyboard shortcut Control + P.

Screen Reader: Format grouping. Combo box braille collapsed.

Vikki: Here we find our first option is a dropdown box labeled format. We have three different format options, audio and braille, only audio and only braille. We can use our arrow keys to move through the three choices.

Screen Reader: Audio, audio and braille.

Vikki: Let's tab to our next three options which are all radio buttons. We use our arrow keys to make our selections. Next we have cartridge copy mode.

Screen Reader: Cartridge copy mode grouping. Limit one book on a cartridge or USB device, radio button checked.

Vikki: Let's Down Arrow.

Screen Reader: Allow multiple books on cartridges and devices, radio button checked.

Vikki: With this control we choose whether we want to limit the number of books on our cartridge or allow multiple books. Tabbing to our next option, we find the display mode.

Screen Reader: Display mode grouping. Advanced mode checkboxes are displayed so that multiple items can be operated on at once, radio button checked.

Vikki: Lets Up Arrow.

Screen Reader: Standard mode. Only one item at a time can be selected to copy, delete, download, et cetera, radio button checked.

Vikki: Here we choose between standard mode and advanced mode. If you'd like more information about the difference between these display modes, check out the recently added and most popular books workshop in this series. Let's tab to our next option, status sounds.

Screen Reader: Status sounds grouping. Play status sound on, radio button checked.

Vikki: Let's Down Arrow.

Screen Reader: Play status sound off, radio button checked.

Vikki: With this control we can set the status sound on or off. When it's turned on we hear a status tone when large items take than 10 seconds to load. Once again, we'll tab to our next option, results message display time.

Screen Reader: Result message display time grouping.

Vikki: This control allows us to set how long message is displayed. When we search for books, we tab to the slider bar.

Screen Reader: Three second delay.

Vikki: And then press the arrow keys to increase or decrease the length of time our screen reader has to read informational messages.

Screen Reader: Four second delay. Five second delay, slider five second delay.

Vikki: Let's tab up to our last preference option, the bookshelf directory location.

Screen Reader: Bookshelf directory, leave blank for the default, C users Vicki one drive Hadley institute documents BARD bookshelf.

Vikki: By default BARD Express will place the bookshelf in our documents folder. If we want to change the location, we tap to the button labeled, choose a different directory.

Screen Reader: Choose a different directory button.

Vikki: We then tell BARD where we would like to store our bookshelf. In today's workshop, we learned about various settings and preferences in BARD Express. I'm Vikki Vaughan, and I thank you for joining me.