Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 7, 2013

Bookshare will get more books published in other countries, in far more languages. This will be important for books in languages that cross national boundaries, languages like English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Bangla/Bengali, Indonesian, Swahili and so on.

Copyright 158

Copyright Law United States Library 158

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 21, 2011

The International Dyslexia Association calls these students “SEEDS kids,” for “struggling readers, English language learners, economically disadvantaged youth, dyslexia students and specific learning disability students.” Nor can they buy accessible content from the commercial sector. There are some 7.5 million students (15% of the U.S.

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Student Accessibility Copyright Library 173

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 13, 2015

I liked this quote: In addition to enabling students with disabilities to use content and participate in activities, the concepts also apply to accommodating the individual learning needs of students, such as English language learners, students in rural communities, or students from economically disadvantaged homes.

Education 100

Education National Technology Student 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 28, 2014

Of course, we’d have to focus on local language content. While English might be very useful in Nairobi, Swahili would be the language needed in rural Kenya. If Andrew and his peers can’t cure their blindness, could we help them with access to information?

Ideas 223

Ideas Kenya Brain Software 223

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 22, 2010

Viji has set up partnerships with several noted publishers including Seasons Publishing, based in Chennai, India and Sahitya Akademy which publishes award-winning titles in 15 local languages. I’m proud to work with people like Viji who brings her personal commitment to service with her to work each day.

San Jose 109

San Jose Profile India United Kingdom 109

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 8, 2014

Converting these models into modern programming languages would make them far more usable and accessible, which, in turn, would tremendously help the scientific community tackle climate change threats. As it turns out, these models were originally developed decades ago and many are written in Fortran !

Open Source 174

Open Source Open Illinois Model 174

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 7, 2012

Our Bookshare team has also been working on a special project with Qatar’s Mada Assistive Technology Center to add Arabic-language books to the collection. Bookshare International members now have access to more than 50,000 titles, including books in Spanish, German, French, Hindi, and Tamil, and a collection of textbooks in Afrikaans.

International 166

International Brazil Austria eBook 166

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 23, 2010

Many of the publishers do provide us with permissions do not have global rights, and limit the availability of these books to certain jurisdictions • We first launched international Bookshare in India and have more than 1000 members there, as well as permissions agreements with more than ten publishers in India • We have recently concluded agreements (..)

South Africa 150

South Africa Copyright Ghana India 150

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 10, 2011

Our Bookshare members will also get access to additional features such as study tools, images and multiple languages as the application develops. Read2Go offers word-by-word highlighting with simultaneous text to speech that supports multi-modal reading.

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Audio Boston Student Music 145

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 19, 2013

We look forward to a simple, straightforward and usable treaty that makes it possible for American blind people to have access to the cultural richness of all other languages and countries and for us to serve all of our hundreds of thousands of books to the blind of the world.

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Library United States Copyright Accessibility 203

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MAY 31, 2008

Founded by Indian Institute of Management professor Brij Kothari, the first concept was same language subtitling. They first created original visual story content, and then added different languages. They are already well past doing just Indian languages. Planet Read added subtitles to Bollywood music videos.

Literacy 104

Literacy Adobe India Language 104

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MAY 18, 2008

He also has learned how to build electronics and program in assembly language, as well as being the sort of person who manages to convince anybody who's anybody to join his effort to bring equity to access to print. He has taken on delivering print access as his personal project after his retirement from a senior police force role.

India 100

India Language Library Student 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 21, 2010

I was one of the co-drafters of the treaty language] The U.S. Hot issue this week are the now four proposals on solving the problem of access to print by people with print disabilities globally: The TVI: the treaty sponsored originally by the World Blind Union and supported at WIPO by Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay and Mexico. [I

Copyright 100

Copyright Paraguay Ecuador Brazil 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 3, 2016

We now have volunteers throughout India adding local language titles such as Tamil into Bookshare. This works well for English language titles in demand in both countries, but not for Canadian specific titles, especially in French. But, in countries with a “commercial availability” limitation, it doesn’t work very well there.

Copyright 100

Copyright United States Library eBook 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 7, 2010

When Bookshare scans a book, the OCR program removes all accent marks from non-English languages. One book I worked on included more than eight languages, including Polish and Hungarian, with some unusual accent marks. If you see typos, a few will be ours in oversight, but most are in the original printed text.

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Community Files Student Language 129

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 20, 2008

For the most part, the English language textbooks were as modern as textbooks you'd see in mainland U.S. The books in the local languages were not in as great a shape. In this school, they also had content in Pingelapese, which is a dialect related to the main island language, Pohnpeian.

Micronesia 100

Micronesia Classroom Language Student 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MAY 27, 2008

Plus, as we get more permissions from India publishers, we'll be able to source English language books locally. And, hopefully in the future we'll be able to do books in Indian languages like Hindi and Tamil (and many others, of course). We'll expect to be sending some digital images of books from the U.S.

India 100

India Language Camera Library 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 6, 2006

I'll have a ton more to say about Indian languages over the next few days! and people start getting access to English language books in 2007. Leaning almost entirely on India's technology skill base, the work needed to make the other 22 official Indian languages accessible starts.

India 100

India Tunisia Language Phase 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 5, 2008

The native people of Guam are called Chamorros, and the language is resurgent. The highlight of the meeting for me was showing off books in the local languages that the Bookshare.org team had already scanned or typed in, and which were already on the Bookshare.org website in our library. Not quite ready for students, yet!

Guam 100

Guam Micronesia South Korea Marshall Islands 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 5, 2013

And once the United States Senate ratifies the treaty, it will be possible for libraries like Bookshare to get more content for Americans from sources outside of the United States and in more languages.

Morocco 127

Morocco United States Copyright Library 127

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 16, 2011

Bookshare now has hundreds of titles in Hindi, Tamil, and Spanish, and we recently announced a partnership with the government of Qatar to develop an Arabic language service. Bookshare has successfully piloted an international library for the blind, but we’ve barely begun to remedy the global book famine.

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Qatar Accessibility People Copyright 154

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 22, 2007

Just got some information on this cool program: The Hadley School for the Blind has launched an innovative program of English language learning and empowerment which spans the Pacific Ocean. Chinese are still eager to learn English, because it remains the language of business. Hadley's international branch is located in Fuzhou, China.

China 100

China Skype Student Empowerment 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 9, 2018

The print book doesn’t work for people who are blind, partially sighted, dyslexic, have physical limitations, people who haven’t learned to read, or people who can’t read the particular language of a specific book is written in. Lack of access to the knowledge in books perpetuates ignorance, generates poverty and squanders human potential.

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Accessibility eBook People Copyright 135

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 11, 2010

For the employees English is not their first language and for some it was not the medium of instruction. From manufacturing wheel chairs to digitizing books was a huge change but the employees at Worth Trust were up for the challenge. We started of with a few validators and proof readers, a scanner, a computer and a handful of eager learners.

Skype 168

Skype India California Chart 168

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 15, 2014

Thus far, more than 75 countries have signed the Treaty, and in June India became the first country to ratify it.

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Accessibility Celebrate United States Copyright 194

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 12, 2006

The program focuses on mainly teaching a core vocabulary of sight words in the the desired language, so that adults are able read the local newspaper. TCS has built this curriculum in a handful of Indian languages, and I'm looking forward to receiving a CD with several of these so that I can try my hand at this!

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Consultant Service India Literacy 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 22, 2009

The site already works in a dozen languages and support for giving in more than twenty currencies. I know Terry because he was UBS’ point guy on philanthropy in Singapore and Asia before joining ammado. The challenge around something like this is critical mass, and the ammado team seems to be aiming very high in terms of execution.

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Platform Singapore Asia Social 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 24, 2010

proposal has similar (but not quite as out there) language saying that the organization using the exception has to have the trust of both the publishers and the consumer groups. Yet, this is the requirement of the European proposal for TIs here at WIPO! And, the U.S. A requirement that does not exist in the U.S. exception.

Authoring 150

Authoring Paraguay Law Copyright 150

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 8, 2008

I saw aspects of American and Japanese society overlaid on a societies trying to preserve their traditions and languages. Some of these interactions lead to disabilities, such as the children blind from Vitamin A deficiency, which didn't happen before rice supplanted traditional foods.

Micronesia 100

Micronesia Reflection Guam Marshall Islands 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 30, 2009

These are all folks who believe in technology and have a certain level of common language and understanding (even though the range of people is pretty amazing). This actually works out fine, but don't expect to be doing PowerPoint out there! Many cool people attend, and the quality of the conversations is terrific.

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Afghanistan Michigan Amazon Mashup 133

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 26, 2009

The interesting thing here for me is that they aren't using the language of social entrepreneurship or social enteprise. The Corporation for National and Community Service is clearly at the center of this. They are the organization charged with national service and will be hosting the Social Innovation Fund.

Policy 104

Policy Track Social National 104

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 22, 2006

I liked the demonstration Bryon showed: straightforward language around a very complex and inaccessible topic. It turns out that figuring out whether working helps or hurts you is much more complicated than figuring out your taxes! So, this website takes you through the process for a given job and shows you roughly what to expect.

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Benefit California Org Language 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 28, 2006

One of our dreams for the Route 66 technology is that it could be used to teach reading to people all over the world, in English as well as other languages. Jenny manages the China operations for a global cell phone technology company.

China 100

China Phone Literacy Ideas 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 27, 2013

This grant will allow us to deliver a set of major enhancements and new language translations for Martus, as well as expanded development and broad deployment of Mobile Martus , our brand new Android-based mobile documentation app. We also received our largest-ever award for human rights, a two-year, $2.2 million grant from the U.S.

India 142

India Literacy Global Accessibility 142

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 9, 2008

We visited the English language classroom. These were quite familiar to folks like Frank Simpson of the Lavelle School in New York and Miki Jordan of the Junior Blind of America in Los Angeles. We enjoyed getting a chance to chat with a couple of the students who were impressively fluent.

Los Angeles 100

Los Angeles China Jordan Classroom 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 18, 2005

We are having a great time showing off Bookshare.org, and announced our newest collection of Spanish language books The CSUN conference in Los Angeles is the biggest U.S. disability technology event of the year.

Los Angeles 100

Los Angeles Language Conference Technology 100

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 8, 2011

Through a funded partnership with the Mada Center in Qatar, in 2011 we will pilot Arabic language capability and content, enabling Bookshare to start serving readers throughout the Arabic-speaking world.

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Guatemala Literacy Qatar Open Source 159