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.
