Need: I would like for my blind relative to be able to listen to audio books and podcasts.
I’d like to be able to have a cheep internet connected system to help with that, so that I could put some more audio files onto that gadget.
It would be great to use commodity hardware so that absolutely anyone could build similar system.
I envisage Android phone with numeric hardware keyboard with just a few things:
- a custom launcher that can be controlled by numeric keyboard
- an audio book player that can be controlled by numeric keyboard
- a podcast player that can be controlled by a numeric keyboard
Launcher functionality
- 0: start launcher
- 1: start audio book app
- 2: start podcast app
Audio book functionality
- 0: play book
- 1: previous chapter
- 3: next chapter
- 4: previous book (and maybe read book title)
- 6: next book (and maybe read book title)
Podcast functionality
In the meanwhile I am thinking of just putting whole bunch of podcast episodes via SyncThing to be used by audio book app.
But in the future it may be good to update some open source app to have a good support for hardware keyboards.
Synchting
- to help put things on the Android device
Why numeric keyboard?
- It has enough keys to control audio apps
- It’s available anywhere
- It has few enough keys so that people who cannot see could easily remember the few keys that they need
What is numeric keyboard?
What can this be based on?
- Audio book player Voice github link
- My branch of Voice audio book player github
Updates / diary
2023-12-07
- Setting up Automate to autolaunch Voice:
- runs every 15 seconds
- checks if Voice is in the foreground
- launches Voice if it’s not in the foreground