Contact Details

The Library Resource Centre is open to all clients. We have an accessible information kiosk that covers the major causes of vision impairment and provides fact sheets about living with vision loss.

Adults and children can browse and borrow items from our shelves of resources, which include:

Audio and Braille books
Audio described DVDs
Children's tactile kits, games and toys.

Comfortable chairs and listening posts provide opportunities to relax and listen to our audio material. We also have assistive technology available including:

Video magnifiers
Text-to-speech scanner
Internet accessible computers.

Bookshare Australia

The Association for the Blind of Western Australia and Bookshare.org offer Bookshare services to Australians. Bookshare is a service which can provide a reader witha print disability access to a wide range of titles in DAISY text only format and Braille.

Find out more about Bookshare.

Postal Lending Service

We have the single largest lending collection of cassette talking books in Western Australia. Our convenient and long-standing lending service posts books throughout the State, to the homes of our borrowers. We provide fiction and non-fiction material, chosen via a combination of personalised selections or specific requests from our regular catalogue listings.

For people who enjoy crosswords, we post regular supplies of large print puzzles as featured in the West Australian newspaper.

We also provide a library lending service of Braille books to Western Australian Braille readers. Similar to talking books, Braille books from a range of titles are posted to each borrower's home.

Audio and Braille Production Services

Our alternative format production teams transcribe a range of printed items into Braille and/or audio formats on request for our own individual clients as well as many different customers including businesses, community groups, government departments, educational institutions and members of the public.

Items commonly requested include:

Texts and examination papers for tertiary students
Government reports
Cookery books
Vocational materials
Bus and train timetables
Greeting cards for a friend or relative who is vision impaired
Child's story books.

Audio items can be provided in a variety of forms including MP3 discs, CD and downloadable files.

We can also produce tactile maps, diagrams, and adhesive Braille labels, which are applied to household items and also placed over the print in children's books to enable both people who are sighted and those with a vision impairment to read a book together.

Beyond Books, Beyond Barriers

Our Beyond Books, Beyond Barriers Library project will transform the way we store and supply our library's audio resources.

Our current collection of books on cassette will be changed into a collection of digital downloadable audio book files. This means that we will no longer have rows of shelving holding hundreds of different talking book containers, ready for posting throughout WA.

Instead, our books will all be saved on a large computer server. Any of our borrowers who have access to the internet and the right assistive technology will be able to search our user friendly catalogue and select and download the books they want.

For those people without access to the internet, the library will download digital books onto a cartridge, and post those to our borrowers, for use on a dedicated talking book player.

Our books will be totally accessible for use on any mainstream MP3 player, including devices such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants. In addition, these books will be produced according to a special MP3 file format, known as DAISY, which is a world-wide standard, developed specifically for people who have a print disability. The advantage of this format is that if the books are played using DAISY software on a computer, or using a specialised DAISY player, added features can be used such as the ability to insert book marks or to easily move around within chapters or sections of a book.

Production on Demand

Another exciting aspect of our project is the development of a Production on Demand service. This service has the potential to make thousands of titles available that would otherwise be inaccessible to people who are unable to read printed materials.

The service will take an e-text document from within the public domain and convert it into an alternative format of choice including Braille, large print and audio. The documents must not have copyright restrictions, such as documents in Project Gutenburg. The audio will feature a synthesised voice instead of a human voice, but these are of extremely good quality and continue to improve.