2012-08-29-Bookshare-Ready2Go
Seminars@Hadley
iReading on the iPad and iPhone
Using the Bookshare Read2go App
Presented by
Douglas Walker
Moderated by
Doug Anzolvar
August 29, 2012
Operator:
You're listening to Seminars@Hadley. This seminar is iReading on the iPad and iPhone using the Bookshare Read2go App. Presented by Douglas Walker. Moderated by Doug Anzolvar.
Doug Anzolvar
I’d like to formally open today’s seminar by welcoming you all to Seminars@Hadley. Again, my name is Doug Anzolvar. I’m the Dean of Educational Programs and Instruction here at the Hadley School. Today’s seminar topic is iReading on the iPad and iPhone using the Bookshare Read2go App. You’re presenter for today is Douglas Walker. Doug is one of our Hadley instructors in assistive technology. He has worked in the field of blindness and visual impairment for the past 20 years.
He also teaches assistive technology coursework as the adjunct professor in the vision program at Vanderbilt University and Trevecca Nazarene University. Douglas was previous employed at the Tennessee School for the Blind as their outreach technology consultant, and has also served as an itinerant vision teacher for several counties in western Tennessee. So, without further ado, I would like to welcome Douglas Walker to the seminar, and I’m going to turn the microphone over to you Doug.
Douglas Walker
Again, it’s good to see all you participants in the room. Good to see people that have come back. Again, good to see some of my students in the room, thanks for that support. It’s always great to see you guys here. I am super excited about this seminar today. I absolutely love the Read2go App. I noticed about half the people in the room have iDevices, and a lot of those are using that to read audio, so that’s cool. So with apps like the Read2go app, the Learning Ally app, and hopefully the NLS app will be coming out sometime this year.
All of the major services will be on iDevices for us to get our content that way, so that’s really exciting. Like I said, I love this Read2go app; I use it every single day to download my newspapers, get my magazines, and also get just a ton of different books. So, we’re going to get into all of that today. Sort of give you an overview of where we’re going to go, we’re going to talk about what you need to do to get started using the Read2go app.
We’ll talk a little bit about where to get the Read2go app. We’ll then get into the app itself. We’ll talk about some gestures, how to move around.
I noticed that half the room didn’t have iDevices. Hopefully this will get you out there and get your hands on some Apple products and show you how easy it is to navigate these Apple products with the gestures. So, we’ll talk about gestures and how to move around and then we’ll get into the Help menus in the app, all the settings that are there, we’ll do a couple of searches, download a couple of items and then we’ll get to the Bookshelf and watch the things that we’ve downloaded and get to reading those.
Hopefully this will be beneficial, not only for the very beginning iPad/iPhone user, but also we’ll have some tips and tricks for more of the advanced users as well; so there'll be a little bit for everybody here.
Alright, so first of all we need to talk about how to begin in this whole process. To fully use the Read2go app, you need to be signed up with Bookshare.org and you can do that by going to and getting yourself signed up there with a membership. Two of the places you’re probably going to want to go as soon as you get to the website, they have a link that's a Getting Started link. There is just a wealth of information there. Not only on using the Read2go app, but also how to access all the Bookshare content, to download it directly to your computer and start listening. Also, there's free software to read it on the computer so, that’s great as well.
And then, there’s also a link that’s a membership link. A couple of different ways that you can get signed up as a user of the Bookshare content. One of those ways is if you are a K12 student, even a post-grad student, you can sign up for a free Bookshare account. I think that’s via a U.S. grant, Federal grant that they have right now. You can sign up for a free Bookshare account if you’re a student.
Myself, I am signed up for an individual account. I believe for an individual account there’s like a, $75 for that first year; $25 signup fee and my $50 subscription fee. My renewal just came up. They’ll send you an email letting you know. Mine comes up in October so believe me, I will be signing back up for another years’ worth of content. That $50 is really—if you talk about just downloading one or two audio books it’s already paid for itself. If you talk about all the newspapers and magazines that you can get and all the subscriptions you have to pay for, the $50 is well worth it.
That’s the first thing you need to do, get to be a Bookshare member first. You’ll receive a username and password to get into the website. That is the same username and password that you’re going to use to access the Read2go app. So, that’s where you need to go first and get all signed up.
After you’re signed up, the next thing you’re going to need on your iDevice, is the Read2go app. That’s R-e-a-d-the number 2-g-o, so it’s Read2go. There’s a couple of ways you can get that on your device. You can go right to iTunes and go into the App Store. You can download it from there directly to your iTunes and then transfer it to your iDevice. The app is going to cost you $19.99 right now, which is still relatively inexpensive for all the content that you get. It’s a super app, really powerful and allows you to get a lot of content. $19.99 and it is yours.
You can put it on as many as ten iDevices right now using your Apple ID. You do have to have the Apple ID. The other way you can get the app on your device is by going directly to the App Store on your device and doing a search there for the Read2go app. You can purchase it right on your device and have it download directly to your device, and then there you are. You’re good to go; you’re ready to start using the Read2go app.
That’s what you need to do. You need to go to Bookshare member first, then go get that Read2go app, and then you’re ready to start downloading the content and reading on your iPhone, you’re iPad, or you’re iPod Touch.
Let’s get started with a few simple gestures that you’re going to need to know to access it. There’s really only three or four gestures that you need to know, to totally be able to navigate the app and to be able to get around. This is what sort of starts scaring people; using voiceover on the iPad. At first all the gestures—but really there’s only a few that you really have to know to access it.
On this simple gesture that I’m about to show you, you simply just pin your finger on the glass or on the front part of your iPad, and start dragging your finger around. So, I’m going to put my finger on there. All right and I have mine set up in folders with all the apps in folders. I like to have everything on one page. It just makes it easier for me. I’m going to start dragging my finger around the screen. So, I’m just dragging across the screen. There’s an empty area there.
So, that’s one way to access it and that’s actually a gesture, touching the screen and moving your finger around, is a gesture. But that’s not necessarily the most efficient way of moving around the screen. Because dragging around to look for something you could get lost on the screen. Unless of course you know that the app that you’re wanting is in the bottom or corner of the screen. I know my Safari is down there, I know the bottom right hand corner is where my Settings are, so I can just tap there.
That’s just one gesture that you need to know. I’ll go back to the top left where my accessible apps folder is. All my folders are set up alphabetically on the screen. I’m going to start swiping now. Swiping is the next gesture that we need to know. Swiping is not putting your finger on the screen and then dragging it across. That’s where some people getting into trouble and that’s the first gesture we just did.
Swiping is actually just glancing your finger on the screen of the iPad and just sort of brushing it to the right. Sort of like you’re brushing off dust or sand off of a surface. It’s just a simple glance across the screen. So, we’re just going to be swiping to the right and then swiping across to the left to move from item to item. Our items are in rows and columns. As I swipe it will move across the row and when I hit the end of the row, it will jump back to the beginning of the next row.
I’m going to swipe to the right. You heard a little tap. That’s hitting that next item there. I’m going to move down to my reading folder. I’m just going to swipe, swipe, swipe until I get there. Alright, 17 apps; I only use about five, but I have 17 apps in there. We’ve got two gestures down. One’s just touching; one’s swiping to the right and to the left. The next gesture is going to be a double tap.
It’s similar to—if you’re having your screen reader read a word or spell a word, that’s that double tap on the NumPad 5 with Insert. It’s that tap, tap, like that. So, I’m going to do that. Anytime you double tap, it activates whatever you’re sitting on. If you’re on a button or it you’re on an item, or if you’re on a folder, it’s going to activate that and open it; similar to hitting Enter to open a folder.
I’m going to double tap on my reading folder to open it. You heard that reading folder open, that’s actually voiceover sound. It put a heading at the top of that. I’m going to swipe to the right until I get to my Read2go folder. Alright, now see if I keep swiping, it's going to tell me I've hit the end with that little tone there, so I'm going to double tap to open my Read2go app. Ok, I have zero books in the bookshelf right now. If it were the first time that I launched that app, it's going to present me with a place to put my username and my password in.
I thought about logging out, in fact I tried it just prepping for this seminar, and it read my password every time I put it in. Not that I don't trust everyone here, but just didn’t want to give out my password to all of these people. So, that's what you're going to be presented with the first time you log in is your username and password field there. Once you log in, anytime you go back to the app it's going to keep you logged in there if you like and you can just jump right in without having to put your username and password in there, but you're going to have to do that. Your username is usually the email address that you signed up with, and then a password.
So, we're in the app now. The app is laid out in tabs across the bottom of the screen. There's four tabs from left to right across the bottom of the screen here. We're going to explore each one of these tabs. This is your main—it's like different pages if I were to explain—or different documents maybe. Or different websites. It's like four different places you can go to do different things within the app. So there's four tabs along the bottom of the screen here.
I'm on the one that's furthest to the left. That's the Bookshelf tab, and it says that it's one of four tabs. I'm going to swipe to the right; we'll go to the next tab. There's our Search tab. We'll come back to all these, all the way through this seminar; I'm just going to show you what all the tabs are to begin with. I'm going to swipe to the right again. There's our settings. We'll take a look at that in just a minute and see all the different settings that we have. And there is our Help tab and that's four of four.
That's all we really need to worry about, are just the four different areas that are within the app. It's a very simple app to get around in. Love the fact, I love when the app gives us help that we can get to. So, if I don’t cover something in this seminar, I don’t get deep enough or I don’t touch on something that you're interested in, or if I don’t touch enough on it, you know where to go now to get extra help. You can go there, or you can go to the Bookshare website. All the help you're going to need for your Read2go app, is right here.
Remember the gesture to activate a button or to activate an item? We're on that tab right now, so if I wanted to activate that I would just double tap. And you heard it open, the sound it gave us. I like to orient this to the top of the screen. Right in the very top of every one of these pages that you're going to find on the Read2go app, is a heading. I'm big on knowing where you are on the screen, that's part of the access technology teacher in me; is knowing where we are. It's very much like mobility, if you know where you are then you know where you can go. We have to know where we are on the screen.
We know we are on the bottom right hand corner right now. Let me get to the heading by touching right in the top center. And that's our help heading, and I just touched right below the time that's there on our iPad. I can flick to the right and just start moving down this page. Every time I swipe, click, same thing, it's going to take us to the next item down the screen. Let me swipe to the right. I just like to have the software version up there to make sure we are on the current software, so I'm going to swipe to the right again. This is our Getting Started page.
Alright, so this tells us what this page is all about and now there are links that are going down the page. These links take you to specific help topics. Swipe to the right. And that takes us to our Main Navigation, and swipe to the right again. Tells you all about your general navigation; let me swipe again. All the way down to Setting up a Bookshare Account. There's just a wealth of information here so this Help is a great tab to have. I see why they made it very prominent in the apps, down at the bottom right hand corner, one of the tabs. So, it's a great place to go to get the help you need to get going on the app.
I'm going to go back down to the bottom right hand corner. It says that it's selected right now, so you know which tab you're in. If you touch one, it’s going to tell you that you're in the app because it's going to say selected. Going to swipe back to the left and we're going to head to the settings. There's the Settings Tab. I'm going to double tap. Remember, when you double tap, you don’t have to tap that place itself, or the Settings button itself. Once you've activated a button you can tap anywhere on the screen to get there. I'm going to double tap just anywhere.
And there we are, we're on our Settings page. I'm going to get to the top by touching right there in the center, and we're on the Settings heading. Now I'm going to dig down this page and show you all the headings. I'm trying-I use the apps sometimes in a very visual way, I have very low vision, but most of the time I use voice over to access the app. We'll talk about the visual things as well as the auditory settings that we have here.
There's really only three different areas that we can really manipulate, to do everything we need to do on the app. We have an area to adjust the font size then we have a different area where we can work on all the visual settings and we have an area where we can work on the audio settings. We can really hand-tailor this app to make it really work for you. I'm going to dig down this page by swiping to the right. There's the font size and it tells us right away that we're 24 point font. I think that's the default.
I'm going to double tap on that to open it. It puts us in the top left on a Back button in case we go into it and we want to instantly go back to the Settings page there. You can just double tap anywhere on the screen and it will take you right back to that page. I like it that it does that. You can start swiping to head all the way down the screen now. I'm going to swipe to the right. That's our heading. I'm going to swipe to the right again. It tells us that we are at 24 point font right now. I'm going to swipe to the right again.
Anytime you hear that something's adjustable, there's the gesture to activate that. It's simply swiping at the page or swiping down. Swiping up the page, if you're using voiceover, will increase that font size, and swiping down is going to decrease the font size. So, if I swipe up, swipe up. Swipe down, it’s going to take us all the way down. If I swipe up, it will take it all the way up. You can hear when we get to the end. It has a little tone in there. A 70 point font is highest it goes. Really, if you're at 70 point font, you're probably going to be more of a voiceover user anyway, because you're only going to have one or two words on the screen.