2013-10-30-BardMobileApp
Seminars@Hadley
Going PC Free with the New
BARD Mobile App
Presented by
Douglas Walker
Moderated by
Doug Anslovar
October 30, 2013
Doug Anslovar
I will go ahead and officially open the seminar today. Again, my name is Doug Anslovar and I am the Dean of Educational Programs and Instructions, here at Hadley School. I will be your moderator for today's seminar. Today's seminar topic is “Going PC Free with the New BARD Mobile App.” We'll discuss how to locate and download NLS contents to an eye device using this app.
Now let me welcome today's presenter, Douglas Walker. Douglas is an instructor of Assistive Technology here at Hadley School for the Blind. He is also responsible for producing instructional videos, focusing on the IPhone, IPad and IPod Touch. These videos can be found on the new Hadley YouTube channel. He also teaches in the vision programs at Vanderbilt and [inaudible 00:01:06] Universities. So I'm going to go ahead and hand over the mic to Douglas, for his presentation.
Douglas Walker
Alright. It is so great to be back for another seminar at Hadley, especially for today's topic. I can't even begin to tell you how excited I am about today's seminar. We've waited a long time for the release of the BARD mobile app, and I am enjoying it just as much as I thought I would. I really am using it every single day, it's very fancy. That's right, and I can't wait to share it with you today so let's go ahead and get started. Now, before we can even start thinking about using the BARD mobile app, you first have to be a BARD member. So how do you do that? How do you become a BARD member?
Well, I'm assuming that most people listening today are already familiar with the National Library Services for the Blind and all the great content, the books and magazines that you can download from there. First you have to be signed up with your state's National Library Services.
Now if you're not signed up, it's very easy to just do a Google search and find out how to contact your state's NLS representative. They'll help you get signed up and get going. If you're really new to NLS you might want to go back and check out a previous seminar that we had here and it's called “The Keys to NLS BARD.” You can find that by going to the past seminar page on the Hadley website.
Ruth [Impel] from NLS, she did a really nice job discussing and talking about how to sign up with an NLS service. And she also talked a little bit, but not so much about BARD, but we're going to concentrate on the BARD end of things today. So you might want to check out that previous “Keys to the NLS BARD” seminar if you're not familiar with NLS. Now BARD stands for “Braille and Audio Reading Download.” Being a member gives you the ability to download Braille and audio books directly from the BARD website, which is really cool.
Now, to sign up for BARD services, you need to go to the BARD website and you can get there by going to “loc” stands for “library of congress,” feel free to remember, and “gov” of course is government. So So once you activate that website, you will be placed on BARD log in page. Now, you'll need to follow the link there, on that page, that says “BARD application instructions.” Once you activate that, it will take you to an application form, you need to fill out to sign up for the application services. Now it's very important to make sure, when you're filling out the application, that you fill out the same address on the BARD application that you used to sign up for your NLS membership. So that's very important.
You'll also need to use a valid email address when you're filling out the application. That's the email address they're going to send you your user name and your password for accessing the BARD website. Now BARD at the Library of Congress will check in with your local library, in your state, to make sure you are eligible for signing up to the BARD services, so if your address that you entered there at BARD, your street address is different than the one from your local state, you're going to be rejected so...If you're not sure, just go ahead and call your local state NLS service and make sure what your address there is, because you've recently moved or something. You want to make sure that match up, because you don't want to be rejected and start the whole process over again.
Now once you've been approved you will receive an email containing your user name and password for getting on to the BARD website. You use that same user name and password for logging in to the BARD mobile app as well. Alright, so that takes care of becoming a BARD member, now you're ready to get the BARD mobile app. Now, we're not going to learn to use iTunes today, so we're assuming that you already know how to do that, and maybe that is a seminar for later on, it will cover it, but you need to go to the iTunes App Store on your device and do a search for the BARD Mobile App. Of course, we're also assuming that you have an Apple ID and an account with Apple for downloading Apps from the App Store.
Now, the app is free, so once the BARD Mobile App comes up, you tap on the Free button there and you'll be prompted to enter your Apple ID and your password. Now once you do that, you double tap on OK, the BARD Mobile App will automatically start downloading and be placed on your desktop of your iDevice. And that is that. Alright, so now you're ready, once you have it downloaded, you're ready to have all the NLS content downloaded directly to your iDevice. And it's going to work, the app is exactly the same with what you're using on your iPhone, the iPod Touch or the IPad. So all this is going to work the same on all those devices.
Okay, so let's go ahead and launch our BARD Mobile App. So go ahead and double tap to launch our BARD app there. Now I have already logged into the BARD app so my phone is going to take me directly into the app, but you have to enter your user name and password there and once you enter that, from that point on, anytime you enter the app, you won't have to enter your user name and password unless you log out and I keep mine logged in, so I don't have to enter that every time. Alright, so after you did that, you're in, and you're ready to start downloading contents.
So we're going to do an App Overview before we start downloading any contents. Okay, so we have four tabs along the bottom of the screen, activating any of these tabs totally changes the screen layout. It's like opening up a completely new webpage, it's like tabbing between webpages or tabbing between different applications. And we're going to start by exploring each one of these tabs. And like I said, they run across the bottom row of the screen here so I'm going to go on and place my finger to the bottom of the left hand corner and we'll start exploring. So there's the Bookshelf. This is where all of our downloaded books and all of our content that we download is going to be stored, now you can think of it just like a bookshelf in your home, where you keep your books and your magazines.
Now we're going to come back here once we've explored all our tabs. Alright, so I'm going to flick to the right – so there's our Get Books tab. And Get Books is where we will go to download all of our books and magazines. So here is actually where we'll perform a search for books and different contents. I will flick to the next tab. Here's our Settings tab, and this is where you can go to really personalize your app and make it work great for you. So we're going to start, after we go through our tabs, we're going to start by coming back here and going through the settings.
I'll flick to the right. Alright, the Now Reading tab will take you right back to the book that you currently have open. This is really a great feature because it gives the ability to go back and browse through all of our books or even go download another book and then quickly be able to jump right back to our player, to the book that we're in so we can just easily get right back to it. Alright, so those are our four tabs and we're going to explore each one of those as we progress today.
Like I said, we're going to start with our settings tab. So I'll flick back to the left to get to that – double tap, selected Settings. Now when you go into your settings, you are presented with three different areas that you can change. Let me flick through this real quick. And then we'll go back and look at each ones of these areas. Alright, so I'm going to flick through these, I'll flick to the right. And we're back on the top. What I'm going to do is change the settings for the heading at the top, so let me flick from there. So we have Audio Settings and that's where we can go in and adjust all of our audio settings and we'll go through each of them. But when you flick to the right again, and there's our Visual Settings and we'll flick one more time and there is our User Accounts Settings, there.
Alright, and then if you flick one more time you'll see the Software Version and everything, at the bottom of the screen. And I'll do that. And if we continue to flick we would be placed in the tabs at the bottom of the screen so I'm flicking my finger from left to right to get through these. Alright, so let's go back to the top and activate our Audio Settings and see what we have there. And I will double-tap to get into that. Now anytime we double click on something, a button, we're usually brought into another list.
So now we're in the Audio Settings list and there's placed a Back button to the top of the page, if I wanted to quickly back, I would just double-tap and it would take us right back to that list of previous items there that we were just in. But I'm going to flick down through this page and see what audio settings we have here. And there's our heading, we usually have a heading at the top of the page, I'll flick to the right. Alright, now this is actually a speed heading, with a percentage. If I flick to the right again, we'll be placed on an adjustable bar and we can adjust the speed. So I'll flick to the right one more time.
Now I can adjust the speed of all of the books that we begin playing in our device. I can speed them up and slow them down. It's really nice to be able to quickly move through a book. I'll show you how to do that, now you will flick up, since we're on the adjustable bar, and it will increase the speed by 25% increments, now. So I'll flick up. And I'll flick up again. And I usually listen to the 175-200%. Flick one more time and it's as easy as that. And I'll start flicking down and when I hit the 100% it will say Normal, so...And I can even make it slower, if I wanted to, I can continue flicking down, but I'm going to leave it at that, I'm going to leave it at the normal speed.
And I will flick again. Alright, so there is our tone and the tone is also normal. Now this is the Heading 2 so once again, I'll be landed on another adjustable bar for the tone. So I'll flick to the right and I'll do as it says and I can flick up and raise by increments of one, here. Now this is like changing the tone, this is like changing it to make it more bassy or to make it more trebly. If I go up, that increases the treble, if I flick down, that makes a more bassy sound. So you can adjust that to however you like it. I'm going to leave it normal and I'll flick back down to normal. And there's a 0 there for Normal, so that's how you adjust the tone.
Alright, so I'm going to flick through the right and we'll go into Background Playback. Now this is off right now but I can double-tap and turn it on, and I'm going to do that. And what this does for us is really nice because now we have the ability, now that it's turned on, we can leave the app, so I can close out of this app and go to a different app and the book would continue to play in the background so if you want the ability to do that, it's great to have this turned on.
The next item here is Auto-Playback, so I'll flick to the right. Okay, that's Autolock during Playback and I'll double-tap to turn that on. Now what this gives us the ability to do is if I were now to lock my device, I mean I could just stick it in my pocket and wouldn't have to worry about making any changes, have it turned around or touched accidentally, no changes would be made. I can just lock it. This could also save on battery life a little bit, because you're not needing to have your screen lit. So it will play when you've locked your screen down. So when we flick to the right again, we'll move to the next item.
Alright, now Skipable refers to the ability to skip different kinds of contents. So if books had headers and footers and annotations and stuff like that, you might have the ability to skip that. We're not going to go into this setting, the books I have downloaded don't have that right now. But if you're in a textbook or something like that, you'd have the ability then to skip those types of things. Alright, so it's a really nice thing to have. So I'm going to flick to the right again.
Now [Verbocity], this turns off and on the self-voicing for all the buttons in the player, so this is more for a low vision user than it is a Voice Over user, and it is the same voice that you will hear in your NLS digital player. So if you were to touch the player button, it would say “Player,” touch the fast forward, it would say “Fast forward.” So this is kind of nice to have. Mine is turned on right now, and now if you are using Voice Over, it's automatically going to be turned off, because Voice Over is going to be giving you all these kinds of hints, so you don't need that. I'm just going to leave mine turned on and typically use Voice Over on my iPhone. And I'll flick to the right one more time, we have one more button on this page.
Alright, so the Restore Default button, if I wanted to have all the settings, the defaults that were when I first downloaded my app, I could just double-tap on that and it would just be as it was when I first downloaded it. Alright, so I think we can go back, I think it's the last button in this list here, so we can go back to our other settings here. So I'm going to start looking for that Back button, I'm going to do what is called a scrub gesture. Now you use two fingers to pat, it's like putting two fingers on the screen and forming the letter Z, you scrub left to right, right to left, left to right. You kind of do it quickly, this makes it really nice to close dialog boxes and move back to the previous page. And it keeps you from having to look for that Back button every time so we're going to do the scrub gesture to go back, and there we are. And I'm back in the Settings list now, so I'm going to flick down until I get to our Visual Settings now.
So I'll flick to the right and flick again to our Visual Settings, I'm going to activate this. And there we are back on the Back button. And it's really nice to place us back on the Back button when we first enter a menu like this. So I'll flick to the right, we should land on the heading. There's our heading, so I'll flick to the right again, now there's our Font Size. I'm going to go ahead and activate this and this is really good for low vision users, but this can really help by changing these settings to really help you reduce your eye fatigue. And here I am onto Back button. So I'll flick to the right, that's our heading.
We have four different choices in this, so I'll go ahead and flick through these – you have Small, Medium, Large and Extra Large. I think I'm going to change to Extra Large, and I'm just going to tap on that. So this makes all of your menus and everything larger text now, so that's kind of nice for the low vision users in the crowd. So alright, I'm going to go ahead and scrub to go back to the previous menu, back to our Visual Settings. I'll flick down to the next item.
Alright, so there is our Contrast, and I'll go and double-tap to activate this. Now this is gives us four different choices of four different types of contrast that we can use here. So I double-tap and open that and we're on the Back button, so I'll start flicking down this list. It's our heading. And there we have black text with a white background. Flick it again, we have white text with a black background there. I'll flick again. Okay, so we have a yellow background with a black text there, and we have a yellow text with a black background. Okay, so we have four choices. This can really help to reduce glare, depending on which one you chose, sometimes people need more light, sometimes they need less. So this really helps with that. So I will scrub to go back to the previous menu and I think there's one more button in this and I'll flick to the right again.