Listening to a Document

When the audio player dashboard appears above the text of the doucment, you will be able to listen to all or part of a document read aloud by a computer-generated voice. You can also download an audio version of the document as an MP3 file.

Listening to the Entire Document

If you want to hear the audio version of the whole document, click the Play button (the triangle) from the player dashboard. Note that if you have any part of the document selected on the page, you will hear just that highlighted text. Refresh the page and then click the Play button -- with no text selected -- to hear the entire document.

To stop the audio, click the square Stop button on the audio player dashboard. To make the audio louder, click on the plus sign (+). To turn the volume down, click on the minus sign (-). During playback, you can also drag the slider bar back and forth to change the place in document that is being read.

To listen to the same text read again, just click the Play button.

The audio player will read aloud the first 190,000 characters when you have selected the entire document. Any text beyond this limit will not be read aloud. A pop-up message will warn you if you have exceeded the audio playback limit.

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Listening to a Highlighted Portion of the Document

If you want to listen to just part of the document, use the mouse to select text from the document (the words you select will be highlighted). Then click the Play triangle button and the voice will give some instructions and then read just the words you selected. The player dashboard will read up to 1000 words that you have highlighted. If you try to select too many words, a pop-up message will appear. You must then select a smaller part of the document.

Once you use the mouse to select words on the page, the player dashboard will be ready to read only a part of the document. To listen to the same text read again, just click the Play button, or you can select another part of the document and click Play. At this point if you want to hear the whole document, you must first refresh the page using your browser's refresh page control. Then click the Play button and you will hear the entire document, starting with the title.

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Saving the Entire Document as an MP3 File

In addition to listening to the document, you may also download an audio version of the document. The system will create an MP3 file that you can save on your computer or to a disk, jump drive, etc. Here's how:

1. From the document display page, click the Download MP3 button. Make sure that no part of the document is selected.
2. Your browser will display a pop-up window so you can save the MP3 file
3. You may change the name of the file to be saved, but keep the .mp3 extension

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