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Technological Protection Measures and the Blind

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

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. The digital content is presented as text, but the built-in read-aloud capability is disabled because of ambiguity over audio rights.

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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. a11y accessibility Bookshare Braille DAISY ebooks Global Literacy print disabilities Reading'

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Donor Spotlight: Lavelle Fund for the Blind

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

Today, Bookshare serves over 330,000 American students with a rapidly growing collection of hundreds of thousands of accessible ebooks. Since we first began offering this option three years ago, Bookshare members have downloaded over 150,000 MP3 files from the collection. government and states like Texas.

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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!

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On the Future of Braille: Thoughts by Radical Braille Advocates

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

argued that we must shift from spending on the provision of hard copy braille to the provision of refreshable braille and the associated digital file formats to enable people to read so much more. “As Another major challenge involves the graphic content in ebooks, such as pictures, charts, and diagrams, formulas and special symbols.

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Objecting to Accessibility Weaseling

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

Last week, the National Federation of the Blind and 22 organizations serving people with disabilities filed detailed objections to a petition from a group of makers of e-reader devices led by Amazon to be exempted from accessibility requirements under the relatively new Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act.

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The Struggle for Book Access (Blog Post #1)

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

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.