Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 8, 2013

The world has finally moved beyond just electronically creating books that are then distributed as ordinary print books to actually delivering digital ebooks. In technical terms, this means that the next version of the DAISY format, version 4, will be the same as EPUB3, the main format used by commercial publishers of ebooks.

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Accessibility Global eBook Copyright 155

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 30, 2013

Next month, I will be heading to TOC a couple of days early in order to participate in a W3C Workshop on eBooks and the Open Web Platform, where I will be talking about Social DRM (Digital Rights Management). However, strong DRM turns out to be an impediment to the commercial distribution of accessible ebooks.

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Accessibility eBook New York City Social 171

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 12, 2014

Thousands of ebooks are pouring into the collection each month thanks to the dedication of our volunteers around the world and partnerships with more than 500 socially responsible publishers who donate their digital files. a11y accessibility Bookshare Braille DAISY ebooks Global Literacy print disabilities Reading'

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Literacy eBook Global Audio 129

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 28, 2014

Gerardo’s contributions related to the Benetech Global Literacy Program include: Overseeing the building of the tech infrastructure that has taken Bookshare from serving tens of thousands of members to over 300,000 members, with a rapidly growing collection of 280,000+ accessible ebooks.

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Open Source Literacy eBook Empowerment 184

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 29, 2018

Born Accessible: Working with publishers to ensure that any new ebook is accessible to people who read differently - with the goal of one day making Bookshare obsolete. Connected Civil Society: Applying machine learning and computer vision to document human rights violations and promote accountability in Syria in collaboration with the UN.

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News Syria Conservancy eBook 189

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 6, 2011

Gerardo Capiel, Benetech's VP Engineering, just sent me a couple of exciting screen shots on our Read2Go iOS application for accessible reading of ebooks. The first one shows the Special Education category on iTunes, with the Read2Go logo being used to represent the Literacy and Learning section.

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Literacy Chart eBook Application 133

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 7, 2012

People with print disabilities around the world have a right to high-quality ebooks that they can read with assistive technology. These ebooks can quickly be turned into Braille, large print or be read aloud by a synthetic voice synthesizer.

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International Brazil Austria eBook 166

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 5, 2015

Today, Bookshare serves over 330,000 American students with a rapidly growing collection of hundreds of thousands of accessible ebooks. a11y accessibility blind blindness Bookshare DAISY ebooks education giving India Lavelle Fund for the Blind philanthropy print disabilities' government and states like Texas.

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Fund India United States eBook 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 11, 2013

Creating the World’s Largest Collection of Accessible Arabic eBooks Access to knowledge is the critical first step on the path to economic, educational, and social development.

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United Arab Emirates Qatar eBook Language 162

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 22, 2013

This has created the ironic situation where blind people, who because of their disability require access to digital copies, have been effectively locked out of purchasing ebooks for the last decade. Amazon now ships more ebooks than print books in the United States. In some markets, printed books are receding into the past.

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Measure Technology Audio eBook 181

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 3, 2013

The increasing focus on digital content, rather than its printed form, and the shift to electronic distribution of ebooks pave new avenues for removing the barriers to accessibility. At Benetech, we want to ensure that in this brave new world of digital content, braille is as available as any other ebook format to those who want it.

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Literacy eBook Images Accessibility 208

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 26, 2014

Accessible ebooks and Bookshare have helped sixth grader Kevin Leong overcome his reading challenges. a11y accessibility Bookshare disabilities ebooks education equality Reading students tech4good UNICEF' The good news is that major changes in technology are reforming education.

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eBook Accessibility United States Student 203

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 3, 2011

Exciting new tools, including a free, open source Android ebook reader and a free web-based ebook reader along with an accessible bookshelf in “the cloud.” Thousands of ebooks pour into the library from over 168 publishers and textbook requests are fulfilled every month.

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Impact Technology eBook Student 140

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MAY 15, 2012

Poet supports image descriptions for electronic books created in the international DAISY standard for digital talking books and will be compatible with descriptions for ebooks in the EPUB3 format. The teacher could then add alternate image descriptions and download the book again when they are done.

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Images Student Accessibility Content 133

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

We believe that this means that circumvention needs to be addressed in the Treaty to ensure that access does not become a dead letter in an increasingly digital world, where people with disabilities get locked out of ebook content by contractual and technical means.

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eBook Library Alternative Authoring 193

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 13, 2009

In it, we pointed out the irony that the first generation of ebook readers being inaccessible to blind people. This irony continues: it’s a terrible shame that Amazon (and other ebook device vendors) keeps putting out ebook products that are inaccessible to the blind! years ago entitled the Soundproof Book. The ship has sailed.

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Accessibility eBook Amazon Audio 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 23, 2014

We believe that all ebooks should be fully accessible, so that a person with a disability can effectively use the exact same ebook that somebody without a disability gets on their Kindle or iPad. What about yet another order of magnitude beyond that?

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Literacy eBook United Kingdom Accessibility 158

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 10, 2009

But, it's a dream that the commercial ebook vendors keep dashing. We have an action by Amazon that sets back years of work to make ebooks accessible. If Kindle ebooks were available on the Web, other developers could fix many of its limitations such as lousy support for images, problems with complex layouts, inaccessibility.

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Amazon Accessibility eBook Problem 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 3, 2016

Under our copyright exception, we simply buy a copy of the needed print book, scan it using optical character recognition, and create an accessible ebook. Our experience in the United States has shown that economically empowered people with disabilities tend to be voracious readers and active purchasers of accessible audio books and ebooks.

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Copyright United States Library eBook 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 20, 2010

Check out this O'Reilly's announcement tat their ebook bundles now include DAISY talking book format files to see the fabulous work they're doing. We're excited about this trend and the opportunities it creates for the commercial availability of mass market accessible books. O'Reilly is again leading the charge. Why is this a big deal?

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 17, 2009

Although it's digitally available on the Kindle and other ebook platforms, these aren't accessible to our Bookshare members. The hottest book in publishing is already in Bookshare in high quality digital text. Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol launched yesterday to tremendous sales.

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eBook Culture Digital Accessibility 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MAY 2, 2012

Betsy Beaumon, Benetech VP and General Manager of Bookshare During the event, our Bookshare staff offered demos of our Bookshare library and our Go Read accessible ebook reader for Android. They also demoed Read2Go, the accessible ebook application for the Apple OS and Route 66 Literacy, Benetech’s online literacy instructional program.

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Celebrate Google Literacy Library 145

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 5, 2009

As the debate rages about the accessibility of ebooks, it's good to know that most publishers are committed to seeing their works reach people with print disabilities. We're delighted to be working with these top university presses to meet this crucial need through Bookshare.

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Press University Chicago eBook 114

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 21, 2012

Seeing the words being spoken aloud on a device really helped them visualize how blind and dyslexic students use the accessible text ebooks that they create. I was able to demonstrate what we do with the files the students help generate, using our Read2Go application on an iPad.

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Laos Data Digital New York City 235

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 8, 2013

We all want the same ebook that people without disabilities buy (sorry, I mean license) to work perfectly well for people who are blind, physically disabled or dyslexic. She wants to see every piece of content that is born digital be born accessible.

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Accessibility Amazon Library eBook 133

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 10, 2010

They also operate Web Braille, an online Braille ebook service with roughly ten thousand titles. Footnote: NLS stands for the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, part of the U.S. Library of Congress and the nation's number one provider of books for blind people.

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Library eBook Global National 156

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 24, 2018

What if we could scan once, proofread the resulting scan, and share that ebook with tens of thousands of eager readers? In late 1999, I had just seen the original Napster product, and I knew we had thousands of families scanning the same Harry Potter book on our reading machines for people who were blind or dyslexic.

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Mentoring Copyright Law Photography 167

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 16, 2011

This is becoming crucially important as the problem of delivering access to text is increasingly solved by the move to ebook publishing and solutions like our Bookshare library. Of course, just as we're solving the text problem, more and more content is moving to richer, more visual forms like graphics, simulations and flash!

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Images Alternative Student Accessibility 194

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 17, 2015

It helps hasten the development of a domestic electronic book industry in your country, since ebooks are one core format for providing accessible books. · It is politically popular. Helping people with disabilities gain access to education and books is a cause everyone can identify with.

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Copyright Law Library eBook 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 21, 2012

We think that all publishers should sell accessible ebooks when they sell their books through mainstream channels, but the copyright exception leaves that decision to the publishers except for this narrow community of people who are significantly disabled when it comes to print.

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Copyright Social Law Student 158

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 8, 2015

Our Bookshare service is the world’s largest online library of accessible ebooks for people with disabilities, serving over 350,000 users in 60 countries.

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Technology Literacy Social Uganda 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 10, 2009

The second announcement was by Plextor of Japan, about their new ebook player that will play Bookshare books. It still takes downloading the book to a PC and transferring it to the cell phone, but I'm looking forward to getting rid of that extra step! The device also allows users to record their own audio books.

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Spain Japan eBook Audio 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 19, 2009

Our team has been explaining how to assist a disabled senior who doesn't have a PC, by empowering a PC-using child to download the book and load it onto a device like a Victor Stream (an ebook player that has a voice synthesizer that speaks our books).

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eBook Children Press Stream 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 15, 2012

By partnering with all these stakeholders, we reinvented the traditional library for people with print disabilities and brought modern ebook technology to this underserved community. We blew up the old approaches to converting inaccessible books into accessible equivalents.

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Library Student eBook Accessibility 164

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 4, 2013

After all, in the world of eBooks, ten years is pretty old! Now, as new educational materials roll out to meet the new Common Core standards in K–12, and as publishers strive to meet consumer demand for eBooks, the products are increasingly “born digital.”? Thanks again!

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Literacy Program United Arab Emirates Student 166

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 27, 2013

By partnering with the Bookshare community, we reinvented the traditional library for people with print disabilities and brought modern ebook technology to this underserved community. To develop Bookshare, we hired Silicon Valley engineers who had built something similar more than once for one of the major early commercial ebook companies.

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Develop Social Library eBook 144

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 20, 2015

We use digital ebooks at Bookshare’s core, which can easily be turned into braille, large print or digital audio (using synthetic speech technology). Samasource connected us with Daproim in Nairobi to proofread books for our Bookshare project. Bookshare is our large digital library for students with disabilities such as blindness or dyslexia.

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