[Dtb-talk] Photographs of the ABWA talking book Kiosk prototype

[Greg Kearney]

I figured some of you might be interested in these photographs of the Association for the Blind of Western Australia talking book kiosk prototype. These would permit our patrons to download books to their NLS cartridges from various public locations. To access copyrighted works they will need their user name and password. When finished the kiosks will also detect that an NLS cartridge was inserted and to whom the NLS cartridge was assigned. We assign users cartridges which are mailed back and forth with their books, usually four books at a time loaded on to them. I have captioned each photograph below for those who can not see the pictures.



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This is a shot of the full kiosk, we got these from the Medicare offices. They are sturdy have built in networking. The computer is a Apple Macintosh MacMini running VoiceOver Just below the screen is the slot for the cartridge. When finished there will be a conventional female USB connector as well.

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Here is a closeup of the cartridge and the slot together. The slot holder was made from NDF by blind wood workers in our carpentry shop here.
 

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Here is a close up of the cartridge in the slot. The slot assembly has a bracket on the back which holds a standard USB extension cable that leads to the computer in the bottom of the kiosk itself.  When users click on a book to download software we wrote detects if there is a USB drive or NLS cartridge inserted. If it is an NLS cartridge then the software downloads the book and copies the uncompressed book to the cartridge. If the user has inserted any other kind of drive it copies the zip file of the book to that device. We detect cartridges by the manufacturer and device ID code which we read with a Perl script an check against the database of users and their cartridges.  Longer term we would like to have an option where the user could insert the cartridge and the kiosk would look up the next set of books they are to have and load them onto the cartridge. 

If you have any questions drop me a line.

Gregory Kearney | Manager Accessible Media
Association for the Blind of WA - Guide Dogs WA
PO Box 101, Victoria Park WA 6979 | 61 Kitchener Ave, Victoria Park WA 6100
Tel: 08 9311 8246 | Fax: 08 9361 8696 | www.guidedogswa.com.au
Tel: 307-224-4022 (North America)
Email: greg.kearney at guidedogswa.com.au
Email: gkearney at gmail.com