Introduction
The Canute 360 is a Braille e-reader which displays up to nine lines of forty cells. It supports the Braille-ready format (.brf) as well as the portable embosser format (.pef). The NNELS repository offers many BRF files which can be easily loaded onto the Canute.
What You’ll Need
- A Canute 360 *A computer with an internet connection
- Access to the NNELS repository
- An SD card or a USB flash drive (SD card recommended)
Downloading your Book
Log into the NNELS repository and search for a book in electronic Braille (BRF) format. For a multi-volume example, you can try Tender labour : migrant care work, Filipina/o young people, and family life across borders.
Choose the link called “Download BRF - Electronic Braille”. At this point, depending on the book you downloaded, you will get one of two file formats:
- If the book only contains one Braille volume, you will download a single .brf file.
- If the book contains multiple volumes, you will download a .zip file containing all the volumes. Our sample book is a zip file containing six .brf files, labeled “tender-labour_vol-1.brf”, “tender-labour_vol-2.brf”, etc.
If your book is only a single .brf file, you can safely copy this file onto the SD card or USB drive you intend to use with the Canute. If your book is a .zip containing multiple volumes, the Canute will not read this file directly. You will need to open the zip file, copy one or more of the .brf files, and paste those files onto the card instead.
Opening your Book
Before inserting new media, turn off the Canute if necessary. You can accomplish this by holding the small power button near the AC plug on the far edge of the unit for three seconds.
The Canute has several ports on the left-hand side. Starting with the port closest to you, these are:
- An HDMI port (currently not used)
- A headphone audio port (currently not used)
- An SD card slot (near the bottom of the unit, and therefore hard to locate without lifting the end of the unit slightly)
- Two standard USB A ports
- A USB B port (also known as a printer port, and currently not used)
The important ones are the USB A ports and the SD card slot. If you are using an SD card, insert the card into the slot with the ridges going in first, and facing toward the ceiling. If you are using a USB drive, you may plug it into either of the ports.
Turn on the unit by holding the power button for three seconds. The device will undergo a startup sequence which takes approximately one minute to complete. When the unit is ready for use, it will display the last book that was opened. If that file is unavailable or you’ve never opened a book before, information about the Canute will be displayed instead. This is a sample document stored in internal memory.
To select a book to open, you first need to access the menu and then open the library. To access the menu, press the large “menu” button on the front of the unit. The device will spend several seconds refreshing the Braille lines with a menu interface.
When the device finishes refreshing, find the line of Braille that says “view library menu”, and press the button to the immediate left of that line. This is typically the bottom-most line and therefore the button labeled with the number 9. The device will refresh again, this time loading a list of files.
If your SD card or USB drive is properly inserted, you should now see the files you pasted onto the SD card. If there are more than nine files, you can use the “forward” button on the front of the unit to load more.
When you find the file you’d like to open, press the button immediately to the left of the corresponding Braille line. The file will open at the last-known position, which defaults to the beginning of the book.
Reading your Book
When your book is open, you can use the “back” and “forward” buttons to move through the text nine lines at a time. The device will take several seconds to refresh, and the lines will change from top to bottom. Therefore, for a seamless reading experience, you can press the “forward” button when you are on line 7 or 8. By the time you’re finished reading the bottom line, new text will have loaded onto the top line, and you can simply start reading from the top while the device finishes refreshing.
You can use the “menu” button to access bookmarks, jump to a page, open the system menu, or return to the library and choose a new book. Your position in each file is saved, so you can safely switch among multiple books without losing your place in any of them. Whenever you power off the unit, it will power on and load the last file that was open.
A Note About Page Size
The Canute has a “page” size of nine lines. Most electronic Braille files are formatted for embossing, which means they assume a page size of 25 lines. While the line length of 40 will match, you may encounter page breaks in unexpected places. In some files, you might also encounter many blank lines in a row when a Braille page ends before the bottom. If your forward button does not seem to load any new text, try pressing it two or three more times.
The nine-line page size also means that your Canute will not count pages in an embosser-ready BRF in the same way they are counted in the book itself. For instance, a volume might contain print pages 1-50, spread across Braille pages 1-100. However, since the Canute counts each new set of nine lines as a new page, it might display this document as 300 Canute pages. This can create confusion when jumping to a new page, since the Canute page number has no relation to either the Braille or print page number.
Further Reading
Canute User Manual (Dotless) - Recommended for Screen Reader Users
Canute User Manual (With Dot Patterns) - Recommended for Sighted Users Unfamiliar with Braille