Database Accessibility

All of ABC-CLIO's databases, including Daily Life Through History, The African American Experience, The American Indian Experience, and the ABC-CLIO eBooks Collection uses ReadSpeaker for text-to-speech. Follow the instructions below to learn how to use this feature:

How to listen to the main content:

Click the Listen button to listen to the webpage's content:

A control panel will appear (see image below) and ReadSpeaker automatically starts reading the text of the webpage out loud.

In the control panel you can:

• Pause/restart the reading
• Stop the reading
• Use the progress bar to navigate in the audio
• Adjust the volume
• Click the settings icon to adjust the behavior of the service
• Click the download icon to download the audio file
• Close the control panel

How to listen to selected text:

You can select a part of the text that you want to listen to and then press the pop-up Listen button that appears next to the mouse pointer. When you click the pop-up Listen button, a control panel will appear (see the image below) and ReadSpeaker will automatically start reading the text you have selected.

Settings:

In the settings menu you can:

• Choose whether you want to have the text highlighted while read
• Choose style and colors for the highlighting
• Choose whether you want the reading speed to be slow, medium, or fast
• Choose whether you want the page to scroll automatically to follow the highlighted text
• Choose whether you want the pop-up Listen button to be shown when text is selected

You can use tab/shift+tab to navigate in the control panel and press enter to activate a certain button or link.

ABC-CLIO content can be translated into the language of your choice. See the instructions below to learn how:

To translate text, select the Translate button in the top right-hand corner.

A drop-down menu will appear. Select your preferred language.

Closed-captioning for ABC-CLIO audio and video materials can be enabled. After finding the audio or video you need, select the closed-captioned button (CC). Select your preferred CC settings:

Transcripts for audio and video materials are also available. Select the Transcript link below the multimedia item:

Readspeaker and Translate features are also available within transcripts.