For adult readers with blindness or low vision, the Library offers a wide selection of Large Print materials and audiobooks on CD across all locations.
APL has a collection of children's books in braille for kids of all ages, from infants to teens. Browse the youth braille books in the Catalog. Browse the teen braille books in the Catalog. If you would like to browse this collection in person, braille materials are housed at the Central Library and at the Yarborough branch. These materials can be transferred to any branch by placing them on hold and selecting a preferred branch for pickup.
Our Digital Resources offer content with features that increase accessibility to patrons with disabilities. You can access our Digital Resources entirely from home with your Library Card number and password.
Libby provides eBooks, eAudiobooks and eMagazines and offers a number of accessible features.
For an overview of accessible features and how to use them, check out Libby for Every Reader, a free short course from Libby.
Individual articles can be found on the Libby help site:
cloudLibrary and hoopla allow you to change the font size in ebooks, and offer eAudiobook collections. cloudLibrary also allows you to select dyslexic font.
The TumbleBook Library is a collection of animated, talking picture books for children in English, Spanish and French. The Chapter Books collection allows readers to change the colors of the background and text, as well as the font style, size and line spacing.
Some children's eBooks in the Libby collection also include narration.
hoopla also offers a number of eBooks with a read-along feature that can be streamed to devices (Chromecast, Roku, Apple TV). Search read along in hoopla, or select the read along tag.
hoopla endeavors to provide closed captioning for all video content when available. They also have an accessibility statement.
Kanopy offers accessibility features for visually impaired users, as follows:
The Library's large DVD collection includes titles with assistive features. You can search for titles with descriptive video by doing a keyword search for Video recordings for people with visual disabilities.
To see whether a particular title has assistive features, scroll down and select the Full Details link under the About section heading.
On the Full Details page, you can find accessibility options under the Subject and genre heading, Genre subheading.
You can also find accessibility options under the Notes section, Accessibility Features subheading.
Please note that a Catalog search may not be exhaustive; assistive features such as closed captioning and descriptive video are not always included in an item's individual catalog record.
Windows Screen Magnification tools are available at all Austin Public Library branches.
JAWS screen reading software is available at certain Austin Public Library branches:
New to JAWS? Try the JAWS Basic Training lessons, available in DAISY, MP3, and HTML files.
A large-type MAGic keyboard and BIGtrack Trackball (to use instead of a mouse) are available at most Austin Public Library branches, upon request:
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) text capture and audio readout equipment is available at the Austin History Center: Kurzweil Reading Edge.
New to the Reading Edge? Try the Beginner's Guide from Geocities.
Tabletop magnifying equipment is available at Ruiz: SmartView 5000.
APL has 2 MonoMouse devices available for check-out. This video magnifier, shaped and handled like an oversized computer mouse, enlarges printed text and images when plugged into a television's video jack. Place a hold on a MonoMouse device.
New to MonoMouse? Check out the MonoMouse manual for usage instructions.
The Library's Windsor Park Branch has a braille overlay for its StoryWalk. A StoryWalk® is a permanent outdoor installation incorporating a children’s story that has been deconstructed, with each page displayed separately along a path for participants to read and enjoy. The APL Windsor Park StoryWalk® currently tells A Pizza With Everything on It by Kyle Scheele.
The Texas Talking Book Program, a division of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, provided the braille overlay for the Windsor Park Branch. This feature is placed on top of the permanent StoryWalk® display so that braille-reading visitors can touch and read along.
While not an Austin Public Library service, we highly recommend the Talking Book Program (TBP) from the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. TBP provides free library services to qualifying Texans with visual, physical, or reading disabilities. TBP is part of the National Library Service to the Blind and Print Disabled, a program administered by the Library of Congress. The TBP collection consists of more than 100,000 titles, including hundreds of titles in Spanish, and some in French, German, Russian, and other languages.
Learn more and apply for TBP. An Austin Public Library staff member with a master's degree in Library Science can act as the application's Certifying Authority. We recommend that you either call your local library branch to see if a staff member there fits that description, or that you come to the Central Library.
You can access the majority of databases from home with a valid Library Card number and password. Forgot your password? If you do not have a Library Card, you can access databases by logging on to any Library computer or by connecting your personal device to the Library's WiFi network at any APL location. You can also apply for a Library card online.
All TexShare databases are ADA-compliant and each resource should have an associated Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) to render them accessible to users with blindness/low vision, Deaf or hard of hearing users or users with mobility issues. These can be found by visiting our All Digital Resources page and selecting TexShare under the Access filter.
All Gale databases, all EBSCOhost databases, and the SciTech Premium Collection database offer the ability to listen to HTML articles.
Select the Display options icon to change the background color, font (including dyslexic font) and line, letter and word spacing.
Select the Listen icon to expand the player and begin playback. Select the cog, or Settings, icon to access additional assistive features, including:
Select the red arrow to Listen. Select the cog, or Settings, icon to access additional assistive features, including:
Select the Download mp3 icon to download an mp3 of the article.
If an HTML full-text version isn't available for an article, many of the PDF full-text articles from our database vendors are OCR-software compatible. However, this feature is available on a case-by-case basis, depending on the PDF provider/publisher rather than the database vendor.
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