article thumbnail

Benetech’s New Image Description Tool Improves Accessibility of Graphical Content for Students with Print Disabilities

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

This week, Benetech’s DIAGRAM Center has announced the release of an open source web application for creating and editing crowdsourced image descriptions in books used by students with print disabilities. Books with image descriptions will go back into the Bookshare library for students with print disabilities to use in their coursework.

Images 133
article thumbnail

Advancing Reading Equality with Bookshare’s Exponential Growth

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

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. These milestones represent a giant leap forward in the number of students and individuals we serve.

Literacy 129
professionals

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

Digital Divide Data: our Partner in Laos

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

The DDD student staff people work half days at DDD, proofing textbooks to make them accessible to students with print disabilities. Our partners proofread the text, fixing mistakes and adding accessibility, and ship us the files back to add to our Bookshare library. We scan the books in the U.S.,

Laos 235
article thumbnail

Donor Spotlight: Lavelle Fund for the Blind

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

Frankly, it didn’t go as well as we had hoped, and Lavelle worked with us to retarget the grant to focus on students with visual impairments. This experience helped us prove the potential of Bookshare to meet the needs of students with disabilities. Even in the United States, this was true of probably a quarter of our student users.

Fund 100
article thumbnail

Bringing Millions of Books to Billions of People: Making the Book Truly Accessible

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

The miracle of ebooks What if we had the ability to overcome these accessibility barriers, barriers that affect most of humanity, not just people with identified disabilities, wouldn’t we have the moral obligation to act? We can use the same ebook file to deliver the content ten different ways. We can do better!

article thumbnail

The Gift of Reading, a Circle of Life

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

It became a burden to his family and caregivers to constantly drop what they were doing to turn a page, so he began seeking out ebooks. It also demonstrates how each ebook that is added to the Bookshare collection is a brick in our members’ foundation of independence and inclusion. Eventually he had to ask others to turn pages for him.

Life 147
article thumbnail

On the Future of Braille: Thoughts by Radical Braille Advocates

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

In what is known as the “ braille provision ,” the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 2004 mandates that the teams who help write educational plans for students with disabilities presume that all blind and visually impaired children should be taught Braille unless it is determined to be inappropriate. Accordingly, U.S.

Literacy 208