Summer reading and how to access Bookshare on the Braille Sense 6 – Perkins School for the Blind (2024)

“Summer is a great time to encourage kids to read and actively explore the world. Books can be the perfect springboard to building background knowledge and a love of reading.” (Reading Rockets) Are your students ready for summer reading?

Prepare students for summer reading

Does your student have his/her Bookshare credentials and the reading app (if desired) on his/her personal device or a device that he/she will have access to over the summer? Educators can send home summer reading lists for possible required reading or a reading list of books that the student may enjoy. Remember, you, the TSVI, can assign reading books to students! Searching for book ideas? There are many online summer reading lists organized by grades.

Can your student independently download a book (free from Bookshare!) and access the desired book on his/her preferred device? For younger students, have you shared Bookshare instructions with parents, so they can support the student if needed? Bookshare has a new website; the Help and Learn Center located at the bottom of their Home page is a helpful resource. Does your student know how to set the font size, color and rate of speech? Does your braille student know how to download and access books on his/her braille display? The following article is a great step-by-step article on how to download and access a Bookshare book on a Braille Sense 6.

How to download and access a Bookshare book on a Braille Sense 6

Original source: Vision Ireland

In today’s article, we will be covering how to access Bookshare on the Braille Sense 6. We will be going step-by-step on how to log on and download books.

Stage one

1. Power on your Braille Sense 6
2. Press F1 to take you directly to the main menu and place it onto the File Manager.
3. Navigate down to the Books option.
4. Pressing enter you will be placed onto the DAISY PLAYER.
5. Move down the different options until you find “Bookshare Download.”

Stage two

1. Press the Enter key and you will be taken to the logon screen.
2. You will be prompted to input your Bookshare account information and press enter.
3. The first dialog box that you will be shown is the username/email where you will be asked to input the email account that used to sign up with.
4. Pressing F3 you will be placed into the Password dialog box, here is where you will input your password.
5. Once you have made sure all your account information is correct, press Enter.
6. Once you have logged in you will be shown several separate ways to search for books to download from Bookshare.
7. By pressing F3 you move to the search function and with this you can search by title of book, author, or category.

Today we are just focusing on searching via title.

Search by title

1. When you find ‘Search by Title,’you can input the name of the book you want.
2. Once you have done that, press enter, and you will be displayed several different book titles related to what you are wanting to search for.
3. If you are wanting to check the description of the book, find the title and press F3 until you find the book details.
4. Press the Enter key and you will be displaying all the different information about the book.
5. Move down to synopsis: here is where you can find the description of the book.

Discover book details

1. To discover out-of-the-book details, press F3 until you reach cancel.
2. Pressing this will bring you out of the book detail section.
3. Pressing spacebar F3 will move you backwards the options until you get back to the book title.
4. Once you have found your desired book, press F3 until you reach the download button, pressing enter will start the download.
5. This might take a few minutes depending on the file format that is being downloaded and your internet speed.

Book downloaded and accessing Bookshare program

1. Once your book is downloaded, you can then access the Bookshare program.
2. Pressing space with as with exit you from the program or by pressing F4.
3. You can then move to the DAISY player and press enter.
4. When your program has loaded you will be displayed with all the books that you have downloaded to your device from Bookshare.
5. When you find the title that you want to read or have recently downloaded press F3 on the title and you are shown a confirm button and press enter, this will open your book for you to be able to read.
6. To exit your book, press the spacebar and Z.

This is how you can access the book directly from Braille Sense 6.

Resources

• Bookstore’s new website design, what’s new and what’s coming
• Buckle up for summer reading: Bookshare
• Summer reading with Bookshare: Smart speakers and human-narrated audiobooks
• Bookshare and Braille digital formats
• Read Bookshare Books using Microsoft Word with JAWS
• Booksthare’s Partner Tools (Bookshare website about devices and apps)
• Luisa: Bookshare download to SD card reader using JAWS (student video tutorial)

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