LibriVox Guide
A guide for Jaws users, written by Chorlton Workshop for
hsbp.
Introduction
This is a guide for the LibriVox website, which can be found
at www.librivox.org.
LibriVox is a completely voluntary organisation which makes
audio recordings of books which are in the public domain,
and then makes them available for free. Note that these books are
in the public domain in the USA, but LibriVox asks users in other
countries to verify the copyright status of a work in that country
before downloading, so that copyright laws are not broken.
LibriVox was started in August 2005, and their completely crazy aim
is to record all the books in the public domain.
The books available include novels, poetry and non-fiction.
Some of the books are read by a single person, others have chapters
read by different people.
The recordings can be downloaded in a number of ways, including
as podcasts and bit torrents, but this guide only covers using the
standard download facility of your web browser. You can download
either individual chapters or an entire book. The guide includes
instructions both for Internet Explorer and Firefox running under
Windows XP
The recordings are all available in mp3 format, and so you can
use Windows Media Player, or another media player to listen to them.
Note that RealPlayer often cuts off the last few seconds of the
recordings.
The remaining sections of the guide are as follows:
Page structure
This is the overall structure of the pages on the LibriVox website:
- Banner across the top. This contains the text
“LibriVox: acoustical liberation of books in the
public domain”, but it's invisible to Jaws users.
- Main content.
- Navigation. This includes the following subsections, and
all except the first have a level 2 heading:
- LibriVox free audio books. Information about LibriVox.
- listen to LibriVox. This includes a link to the catalog.
LibriVox Catalog
In the LibriVox catalog, each book has its own web page, and
we'll call these pages book pages. This section describes how
to navigate the catalog to find a book page, from where you
can download individual chapters or the entire book.
To get to the main page of the LibriVox catalog from any page on the website
do one of the following:
- Move to the “listen to LibriVox” level 2
heading in the navigation section. Then open the “our catalog”
link in the list of links which follows the heading.
- Use the links list dialog to find the “our catalog”
link, and open it.
There's also a link to the LibriVox catalog near the beginning
of the main content on the home page of the website.
Catalog main page
The title of the catalog main page is “LibriVox: Search LibriVox Audiobooks”,
and the level two heading of the content section is Search LibriVox
Audiobooks.
The catalog main page contains form controls for a title
and/or author search, and the following list of links for alternative searching
or browsing:
- Browse Entire Catalog
- Recently Cataloged
- More Search Options
The following sections will describe some of these methods of
searching and browsing.
Title and/or author search
The catalog main page contains four form controls for a title
and/or author search:
- Title edit box.
- Author edit box.
- Status combo box. This lets you specify the status of the
books that are found in the search. The options are:
Any, Complete, In progress, Open, Fully subscribed, and Proof Listening.
You'll probably be only interested in complete books,
and the following description will assume this setting.
- Search button.
You can use the quick navigation key E to quickly
find the edit boxes (or F for next form control,
if you have an older version of jaws). You can enter text in one
or both of the edit boxes, and partial words are allowed.
After pressing the search button, you're taken to a page of
results, which has the title “LibriVox: Search Results”.
The format of this page depends on whether there are more
than 40 matches.
If there are no more than 40 matches, then there is a single
results page, and the contents section of this page contains:
- a level 2 heading: the number of matches.
- a level 3 heading: complete works.
- A numbered list of the results. Each item in the list consists of two
links: the author and title of the work, which is a link to a book
page; a readers link which takes you to information about the readers
of the book. It's useful to use the quick navigation key I
to navigate through the list, as this means that you don't
have to keep on listening to Jaws saying the readers link.
- A level 2 heading, Search again, followed by the form controls
needed to do another title and/or author search.
If there are more than 40 matches, then your taken to the first
of a number of results pages. The content section of this page contains:
- A level 2 heading: Showing matches 1-40 out of some number.
- A series of numbers which are links to all the results pages.
- A level 3 heading: Complete works.
- A numbered list of results which has the same format as described
above when there was only a single results page.
- A repeat of the series of numbers which are links to all the
pages of the results. If you're in the middle of the previous
list of results and you want to move to another page then the
keystroke > (which is shift + .) which steps you out of
an element is useful for moving quickly to this series of links.
- A level 2 heading, Search again, followed by the form controls
needed to do another title and/or author search.
Browse entire catalog
If you open the Browse the entire catalog link on the catalog
main page, this is equivalent
to doing a title and/or author search with no text in the title and
author edit boxes, and the status set to complete. You're taken to
the first of a number of results pages which contain all the complete
books in the catalog.
Recently Cataloged
If you open the Recently Cataloged link on the catalog main page,
then you're taken to a page whose content section contains
the level 2 heading what's new. Below this heading are a series of
links to the book pages of recently cataloged books.
Book page
The title of a book page is “LibriVox »
book title, book author”, and the level 2 heading of the
content section is the book title.
This is an overview of the main content:
- Book title.
- The name of the author.
- A brief outline of the book.
- A list of online resources for the book. One of the items
is a link to a zip file of the entire book.
- The name of the reader.
- The total runtime.
- A list of the chapters of the book.
Each item in the list consists of the chapter name,
followed links to audio files in 3 different formats or quality.
Downloading a chapter
On a book page:
- Move to the list of chapters, which is the second list on
the page, and immediately follows the text “mp3 and ogg files”.
- Each item in the list consists of the chapter name, followed by
three links to audio files for the chapter which are in different
formats or sound quality. To move through the chapters it's useful
to use the quick navigation key I, to move through
the items in the list ( assuming you have a recent version of jaws ). Find
the chapter which you want to listen to.
- It's normally best to use the first audio file
— the reasons are given at the end of the section.
To open an audio file with your default mp3 player,
just open the link. If you're using the Firefox browser, a
dialog asks whether you want to open or save the file. The
default is open, so you can just press ENTER.
- The download of the audio file to a temporary folder on your
computer starts, and a dialog opens which tells you the progress
of the download. When this is complete, your default mp3 player
automatically starts playing the audio file. If the download
is going to take a while, you can use the computer for something
else while you're waiting — you'll know when the download
is finished, because the audio file will start playing.
- As noted above, the mp3 file is downloaded to a temporary
folder on your computer. If you want to keep a permanent copy,
and you're using Windows Media Player, you can save
the mp3 file by choosing Save Media as... from the File menu.
Choice of audio file
This section just gives the reasons for using the first of the three audio
files, so just skip it if you're not interested. The first two audio files are in the mp3 format
and the third in the ogg vorbis format. Mp3 is the more common format,
and you'll be able to listen to the file using either Windows
Media Player, or any other media player that you've installed on
your computer (for example RealPlayer). The digitisation rates of the two mp3 files are
64 kilo bits per second (kbps) and 128 kbps respectively. Sound
quality and file size increase with the number of kbps, but
for speech 64kbps is fine.
Downloading a book
LibriVox provides a Zip file containing the mp3 files for
all the chapters in the book. The file has the extension .zip. The
following two sections describe how to download the file using
Internet Explorer and Firefox. After these there's a section
on how to listen to the book.
Using Internet Explorer
On a book page:
- Find the link “Zip file of the entire book” —
you can use the links list dialog to move to the link (INSERT + F7).
- Open the shortcut menu for the link, and choose
“Save Target As...”.
- A Save As dialog opens. The file name will be
“book name”_librivox_64kb_mp3.zip.
To save the file in your My Documents
folder: press ALT + I to open the Save In combo box;
press the letter M a number of times till you select My Documents;
press TAB to close the combo box, and then press ENTER for the
default button, which is Save. For more details on the Save As
dialog, including how to save to other folders,
see the separate guide on the Open and Save As Dialogs.
- A dialog opens, which has the title x% of “file name”,
where x is the percentage of the file that has already been downloaded.
The file will probably take a while to download. You can do something
else, and then switch programs back to the dialog (ALT + TAB) to
check the progress.
- When the download is complete, the title of the dialog changes
to Download complete. Press ENTER to close the dialog.
Using Firefox
On a book page:
- Find the link “Zip file of the entire book” —
you can use the links list dialog to move to the link (INSERT + F7).
- Open the shortcut menu for the link, and choose
“Save Link As...”.
- A Save As dialog opens. The file name will be
“book name”_librivox_64kb_mp3.zip.
To save the file in your My Documents
folder: press ALT + I to open the Save In combo box;
press the letter M a number of times till you select My Documents;
press TAB to close the combo box, and then press ENTER for the
default button, which is Save. For more details on the Save As
dialog, including how to save to other folders,
see the separate guide on the Open and Save As Dialogs.
- A dialog opens, which has the title x% of 1 file - Downloads,
where x is the percentage of the file that has already been downloaded.
The file will probably take a while to download. You can do something
else, and then switch programs back to the dialog (ALT + TAB) to
check the progress.
- When the download is complete, the title of the dialog changes
to Downloads. Press ESC to close the dialog.
Listening to the book
Windows XP treats a Zip file as a special type of folder —
a compressed (zipped) folder. So in Windows Explorer, a zipped
folder can appear in the tree view of the folders and disks.
Sometimes it's necessary to extract the files from a zipped folder
before they can be used, but to listen to the mp3 files in a zipped
folder, you don't need to do this. Here are a couple of ways of
using Windows Explorer to navigate to the mp3 files:
- In the tree view, navigate to the folder containing the
zip folder. Press TAB to move to the List view, and select
the zip folder. Press ENTER to open it. A new
Windows Explorer window opens, in which the Tree view is closed,
and the List view contains the mp3 files for the chapters.
- In the tree view, navigate to the zip folder. Then press
TAB to go to the List view which will be a list of the mp3
files for the chapters.
Select the mp3 file you want to listen to, and press ENTER
to open it. A File Download dialog asking you whether you want to open
the file may open. If it does, the default is Cancel, so you have to
TAB to the Open button and press it. Your default
mp3 player opens and starts playing the file.
Mp3 player keystrokes
Below are some useful keystrokes for both Windows Media Player
and RealPlayer for listening to mp3 files. As noted in the introduction,
RealPlayer often cuts off the last few seconds of recordings.
Windows Media Player
| Command |
Keystroke |
| Play or pause |
CTRL + P |
| Stop |
CTRL + S |
| Volume down |
F9 |
| Volume up |
F10 |
| Fast forward |
CTRL+ SHIFT + F |
RealPlayer
| Command |
Keystroke |
| Play or pause |
CTRL + P |
| Stop |
CTRL + S |
| Volume down |
CTRL + DOWN ARROW |
| Volume up |
CTRL + UP ARROW |
| Fast forward |
CTRL + RIGHT ARROW |
| Rewind |
CTRL + LEFT ARROW |