My name’s Matthew Horspool; I’m 22, and I use RNIB Overdrive when I’m doing my day-to-day
tasks around the house.
You know, like doing the washing up, and doing the cooking and things; and sorting out the
laundry.
And very often I’m using a laptop with JAWS to listen to audiobooks in that context.
RNIB Overdrive and JAWS work quite well together.
There’s some documentation on the RNIB website that you can download when you sign up for
an Overdrive subscription.
They’ll email that to you, which give you the step by step instructions on how to use
RNIB Overdrive with JAWS.
JAWS is a screen-reading programme which means that when I’m browsing around on the internet,
and doing other things on the computer, JAWS will say whereabouts on the screen I am, and
what’s on that part of the screen, which means I can use a computer independently and
it’ll speak to me.
Getting to grips with RNIB Overdrive was fairly straight-forward because I could take the
knowledge I had from other services and bring it to the Overdrive platform.
So what I’m going to do now is demonstrate how to search for a book and download a book
and play that book.
And I’m in an internet explorer window at the moment so I’m just going to type the
address.
(Matthew types the address-JAWS synthetic speech is speaking.)
Ok, so now I’m on the RNIB Overdrive home page, the next thing I need to do is sign
into the system with my library card number and PIN.
So to do that I’m going to find the sign-in link.
(Matthew types to navigate to the sign-in page.
JAWS synthetic speech is speaking.)
Ok, and now I’m on the sign-in page and I’m on the box that asks me for my library
number, and so I’ll type that in and press the tab key, and type in my pin and then press
enter to sign in.
(Matthew types in library card number and pin to login.
JAWS synthetic speech is speaking.)
So that now that I’ve logged in, I’m on the main Overdrive home page.
And there’s a search box on the page that I’m going to move to and type in the title
of the book I’d like to search for.
In this case I think I’m going to go back to my childhood and get one of the Harry Potter
books.
(Matthew types to navigate to the Harry Potter titles.
JAWS synthetic speech is speaking.)
And what I’m going to do now is navigate by heading to the search results and have
a browse through with the arrow keys and see what I can find.
(Matthew navigates around the search results using the arrow keys.
JAWS synthetic speech is speaking.)
Alright we’ll go with Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets why not.
Erm, and so I’ll find the borrow link which is attached to that book.
So now I’ve pressed enter on that borrow link the book has now been borrowed and it’s
on my bookshelf, so I’ll move to the book shelf heading on this page.
(Matthew navigates to the download link using the arrow keys.
JAWS synthetic speech is speaking.)
So I’ve found the download link, what I’m now going to do is press enter on that link
and that will start the download of the audiobook into my computer, ready to play it.
There we go, the download’s now finished and it’s ready to be listened to.
(A short excerpt from the audio download plays.)
I think the RNIB Overdrive service works really smoothly.
I quite like the fact that I can transition from one device to another and it will save
my place and things like that, that’s all very handy.
There’s a fantastic amount of books and the range in the collection is absolutely
brilliant.
If you’d like to find out more about RNIB Overdrive you can email overdrive@rnib.org.uk
or contact the helpline on 0303 123 99 99.