The Text Publications task enables you to listen to your text publications stored on a hard drive. Text publications can be books, newspapers or magazines.
The text publications formats supported are epub and plain text.
Before you can listen to your publications you need to include the folders containing them in the Library. Each publication is in a separate file and can be placed in one or more folders which can be included in the Text Publications media directory as explained in the previous page. Therefore the directory structure in the Library under the Text Publications directory will reflect exactly the structure of the folders you included.
Let's say that all your publications are organized according to their types as follows:
Publications > epub publications > epub publications in individual files
Publications> Text publications > Text publications in individual files
You can listen to your publications by doing the following:
The Text Publications task should be running. To find a publication to play, you need to move the focus to the Library control if you are not already there. To do that, press the 'Focus' [Tab] (3) key.
Press the 'Left' [left arrow] (4) key a few times until you hear a beep and a message indicating that you are at the top level (level 0) of the tree. The focus is on the Text Publications media directory. Press the 'Right' [right arrow] (6) key and you are placed at the first sub-directory 'epub publications'. Navigate Right again and move Up and Down to choose your epub publication; notice that SpeakOn informs you of the epub publication title.
To start to play your publication, press the 'Select' [Enter] (5) key. The focus moves automatically to the Player control. The epub publication starts to play. To stop the file playing, press the 'Select' key again.
If you have more than one publication in the Library, to select another publication, press the 'Focus' key to switch back to the Library control where you can navigate between directories and select another publication.
Navigating the Library with text publications works in exactly the same way.
Like everywhere in SpeakOn, you can navigate publications by choosing the navigation unit with the Left and Right keys. With the 'Up' and 'Down' keys, navigate in increments of the navigation unit selected. The navigation units available depend on the publication format as follows:
With the 'Left' and 'Right' keys, you can select the media navigation unit. The following navigation units are available: 500 lines, 50 lines, paragraph, sentence, line, word, character.
With the 'Up' and 'Down' keys, navigate in increments of the navigation unit selected.
While you can navigate during playing, it is easier to control navigation when the Player is stopped.
In addition to the text navigation units described above for plain text publications, epub publications have the 'all levels' and up to six levels of hierarchy navigation units; you can choose between these using the Left and Right keys and move to these levels with the Up and Down keys.
Epub publications are usually divided into segments. These can be chapters in a book or articles in a newspaper. When a book contains only a series of chapters, it has only one level of navigation. Some books might also be divided into parts which in turn are divided into chapters. In this case the 'parts' are at level one and the chapters are at level two. The epub format supports up to six levels of navigation but in practice it is rare to find a publication with more than three levels of navigation.
In the Player every publication has also the 'all levels' navigation unit which guarantees to take you through every publication segment. You might want to use this level of navigation if you want, for example, to go through all the articles in a newspaper regardless of which level they belong to. In some newspapers, articles can appear on any level.
Use the Info key as follows:
'Info' [F2] (F: Info > Up 8) - publication title available in the Player.
# 'Info' [Shift + F2] (F: Info > Right 6)) - level hierarchy and page number of the current segment if available in the Player - only applicable to epub format.
* 'Info' [Ctrl + F2] (F: Info > Left 4) - publication relative position and length information available in the Player.
*# 'Info' [Ctrl + Shift + F2] (F: Info > Down 2) - publication format information available in the Player.
The SpeakOn Player (reader) allows navigation in publication levels and text elements as explained above. These are usually all that are required for regular reading. The epub format supports HTML elements and the Player clearly shows headings, links, unordered and ordered lists both numerical and alphabetical. Tables are marked but not shown and can be viewed as described further below.
You can follow a link by copying and pasting as follows:
With the Right and Left keys move to the line navigation unit.
Navigate to the line where the link's URL is shown.
Press [Ctrl + b] to mark the beginning of the block you want to copy.
Press the Down key to move to the next line.
Press [Ctrl + e] to mark the end of the block.
Press [Ctrl + c] to copy the link to the clipboard.
Paste the link into your favourite internet browser.
Note that you don't have to remember the procedure above; you can find all the above commands under the Edit menu.
As mentioned above, tables are marked but not shown and you can view these in your default internet browser if you wish. You can also follow links this way and examine the media in more detail with your screen reader or magnifier if required.
You can view the current publication segment in your internet browser from the menu:
View> View publication segment in default internet browser
Your internet browser opens with the current segment and the focus moves to the internet browser where you can examine the segment's elements and follow links as necessary. When you have finished, simply close the browser and move the focus back to SpeakOn.
You can save the current publication segment (chapter in a book or article in a newspaper, for example) in a file from the menu: File > Save publication segment
The 'Save publication segment in file system' task opens allowing you to specify a file name and save the segment to a file in your computer.
You can bookmark publications. This operation is explained
here
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