Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

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

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DIAGRAM stands for Digital Image and Graphics Resources for Accessible Materials. Once volunteer describers sign up as Bookshare volunteers, they can log into the Poet tool, select books, view the images, and enter descriptions for a variety of texts.

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Ethics and Responsibility in Technology-for-Good: A Human-Centered Approach

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

The cost of prototyping and deploying new technology tools is now extremely low and data has the potential to accelerate social progress in areas ranging from poverty to human rights, education, health, and the environment. Our role as technologists is to provide the tools that empower them to do so.

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Thank You, Gerardo!

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

These efforts helped drive Benetech’s new work on accessible widgets, experiments with scalable vector graphics (an open standard for rendering graphics in web browser, developed by W3C), annotation as a tool for accessibility, and more.

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Betsy Beaumon on Benetech's Literacy Program

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DIAGRAM This increase in accessible images would not have been possible without great tools. Click here for more info on this work, including tool demos. Veterans Bookshare has always been a great resource for veterans with print disabilities. Luckily, we know some people who are into that stuff. What if you’re a U.S.

Literacy 166
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Open Source Means Strong Security

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

This is a recurring question that we get at Benetech about Martus —our free, strongly encrypted tool for secure collection and management of sensitive information, built and provided by the Benetech Human Rights Program. “Your secure software is open source: doesn’t that make it less secure?” Does that make Safe Number One less safe?

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DIAGRAM Center

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

Should be a huge resource for the field: check out the product matrices in the Research and Development section of the DIAGRAM web site. I saw an initial demonstration of a web-based image description tool, called Poet. The main tool for image description in the current version of HTML has been the LONGDESC attribute.

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The First Global Martus Users Group Meeting

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

Our mandate, broadly speaking, was to engage in “blue-sky dreaming” and learn from our shared experiences to make Martus a more robust tool. All of us at Benetech felt that it was absolutely essential to once again rely on our user community as we plan how to utilize these limited resources most effectively.

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