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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

One foundation that has been a committed supporter of our work is the Lavelle Fund for the Blind. 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 pilot paved the way for our work in the education field.

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

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

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. 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 This allows a much broader group of experts to keep working on the problem. This is important here in the U.S.,

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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.