Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 10, 2014

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. Suddenly I had thousands upon thousands of books available to me,” he says, “at a price I could afford, in a format I could read independently. I began a reading binge.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 20, 2013

This is the field where I found my life’s calling, applying technology to meet critical needs of society, where the market is likely to fail. He started Computerized Books for the Blind the year before we started Benetech, and became one of our earliest partners. We were following in his footsteps, on a path he helped create!

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 18, 2019

People with disabilities like blindness, visual impairment, dyslexia, physical limitations and returning vets with brain injuries -- anyone who cannot simply pick up a printed book and read it. The nonprofit Benetech team built the revolutionary Bookshare library for this community, all online, and based on the powerfully flexible ebook.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 20, 2010

They were the first publisher to sign on to deliver their books electronically to Bookshare back in 2003, and gave us permission to provide their books outside the U.S. We're excited about this trend and the opportunities it creates for the commercial availability of mass market accessible books. Why is this a big deal?

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 27, 2014

“They get frustrated and don’t want to read,” she says, “but access to digital books and reading technologies changed all that for Zach.” Zach Bryant The change happened when Zach was in high school and his Assistive Technology teacher introduced him to Benetech’s Bookshare library. Thank you for your support!

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 30, 2013

There is no better place to engage with colleagues about new technologies, changing business models, fresh ideas, and shared standards. Next month, I will be heading to TOC a couple of days early in order to participate in a W3C Workshop on eBooks and the Open Web Platform, where I will be talking about Social DRM (Digital Rights Management).

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 12, 2014

At Benetech, we always ask ourselves how our existing successful programs can reach more people who need our services and how we can apply technology in new ways to enrich and improve more lives. a11y accessibility Bookshare Braille DAISY ebooks Global Literacy print disabilities Reading' The majority of our members are U.S.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 8, 2013

I was delighted to speak at the November 15th joint plenary session on “The Right to Read” campaign to achieve a world where published books are accessible and available to all individuals who are blind or have other disabilities. This shift is already happening in major markets: Amazon.com now sells more digital books than print books.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 13, 2009

I think it’s time to write a series of short essays on the struggle for accessible books, starting with this brouhaha. years ago entitled the Soundproof Book. In it, we pointed out the irony that the first generation of ebook readers being inaccessible to blind people. This isn’t a new issue. More on that in another essay.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MARCH 29, 2013

E-Book #1: Fundraising and Marketing Tips for Nonprofits. The npEXPERTS e-book includes Forbes’ most influential, top bloggers, CFRE/ACFREs, animal lovers and association pros, pioneers and innovators, peer-to-peer fundraisers and direct response agitators, online fundraising experts and direct mail gurus all in one place.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 7, 2012

People with print disabilities around the world have a right to high-quality ebooks that they can read with assistive technology. Benetech’s Bookshare library continues to expand its international service providing accessible books and publications to members in more than 30 countries.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 10, 2009

Many print-disabled people (people who are blind, severely dyslexic or a have a physical disability that keeps them from reading regular print books) see electronic books as a dream come true. But, it's a dream that the commercial ebook vendors keep dashing. I am a book lover, and have many books on my shelves.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 3, 2013

“As organizations,” Osborne said, “we must liberate spending to focus on the promotion, learning and innovation around braille,” and recognize that we ought to embrace today’s changing economics and technology so that braille can be part of an equation which delivers access to information for all, not just to those who can afford it.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 11, 2013

Creating the World’s Largest Collection of Accessible Arabic eBooks Access to knowledge is the critical first step on the path to economic, educational, and social development. In 2011, we began collaborating with the Mada Center (Qatar Assistive Technology Center) to create accessible Arabic-language digital books.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 23, 2014

How can we use technology in a new way to improve people’s lives that is an order of magnitude better? Can we help stimulate the creation of far more technology-for-good ventures? Technology currently serves privileged groups through tools that provide access to education, literacy, health, and justice.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MAY 15, 2012

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. Before this initiative, critical illustrations in math and science books could only be studied by those reading traditional texts.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 5, 2015

This revised project included the conversion of books into accessible formats and working with multiple schools. Today, Bookshare serves over 330,000 American students with a rapidly growing collection of hundreds of thousands of accessible ebooks. This pilot paved the way for our work in the education field.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 24, 2018

Gerry was one of the earliest computer software attorneys, and even wrote one of the first books on the subject. As the prototypical technology social enterprise, Benetech became one of the first organizations using technology to solve social problems rather than seeking to make maximum financial returns.

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Tech Soup

APRIL 22, 2013

We recently updated our book, The Resilient Organization: A Guide for Disaster Planning and Recovery. In this update, we wanted to make sure the information can be read from different devices as an e-book. E-books are essentially like HTML files, with special tags that makes it easy for devices to parse the data. Conversion.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 8, 2013

Benetech was a proud endorser of these objections (under our legal organizational name of Beneficent Technology, Inc.). Our primary goal is to ensure that people with disabilities get equal access to the books and content they need for education, employment, leisure and social inclusion.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 16, 2011

This is becoming crucially important as the problem of delivering access to text is increasingly solved by the move to ebook publishing and solutions like our Bookshare library. The initial part of the project was to do a detailed survey of existing assistive technology products, to get a baseline for current support for accessible graphics.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 7, 2013

Reading a Bookshare-downloaded book on the BrailleNote portable device Launched in 2007 to replicate the proven Bookshare model internationally, our Bookshare International library has already grown to serve members in more than 40 countries , many of whom are in the developing world. This is an area of special focus for our Bookshare team.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 3, 2016

If you can buy a book, you can’t borrow it. Marrakesh is intended to end the book famine for people who can’t read regular books because of their disability. Libraries for people who are blind or dyslexic are the primary source of accessible books in audio, large print or braille. exception model works well here.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 15, 2012

With technology, you can do incredible things, but with a galvanized community of supporters who work together toward a greater good, we can do anything. By partnering with all these stakeholders, we reinvented the traditional library for people with print disabilities and brought modern ebook technology to this underserved community.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 27, 2013

I was delighted when Ron Schultz invited me to collaborate with him on his latest book Creating Good Work – The World’s Leading Social Entrepreneurs Show How to Build a Healthy Economy. I look forward to continuing the conversation the book has opened. Converting and delivering these accessible books was expensive and time consuming.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 19, 2014

The Marrakesh Treaty was signed last year, and now the efforts are ramping up to ratify and implement the Treaty, with the goal of helping overcome the book famine faced by people with print disabilities. WIPO has a mandate from its member states, and is working to address the need to change laws and get more accessible books flowing.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 7, 2013

The goal of the Treaty is to end the book famine for people who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print disabled. Ultimately, this community should have equal access to all of the books that are needed for education, employment and social inclusion. Technological Protection Measures. How Does the Treaty Meet this Goal?

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

The only way you could import and export books would be directly between organizations, not people. Everyone who is not disabled globally can directly access Amazon.com and order books. Why should people with disabilities be denied library services because the book might be available for sale in an accessible format?

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 17, 2014

It also underscores just how critical a balanced copyright law is for technology innovation. As a different kind of Silicon Valley tech company—a nonprofit with a pure focus on social good—our goal is to see that the best of technology gets applied to social needs left unaddressed by for-profit businesses.

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Amy Sample Ward

DECEMBER 15, 2009

NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network – "That's right, I said it. What Matters Now eBook – Get the ebook now for free! "We More than seventy extraordinary authors and thinkers contributed to this ebook. ' Open Source Is Dead! Long Live Open Source! "We want to shake things up.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MAY 2, 2012

Betsy Beaumon, Benetech VP and General Manager of Bookshare During the event, our Bookshare staff offered demos of our Bookshare library and our Go Read accessible ebook reader for Android. They also demoed Read2Go, the accessible ebook application for the Apple OS and Route 66 Literacy, Benetech’s online literacy instructional program.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 17, 2015

They include people who are blind, visually impaired, have dyslexia, or have a physical disability that prevents them from reading regular printed books. The Marrakesh Treaty makes it easier for nonprofits, schools, government agencies, and individuals with disabilities to convert inaccessible print books into accessible equivalents.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 4, 2013

The Year That Was and the New Year Ahead Guest Beneblog by Betsy Beaumon, Benetech's VP and General Manager of the Literacy Program 2012 was a year of titanic shifts in the fields of consumer technology, education, and publishing, along with the requisite challenges brought about by such rapid change. We’ve added over 1800 books since then.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 21, 2012

The Section 121 copyright exception (often known as the Chafee Amendment after the Senator who introduced it in 1996) makes it possible for Benetech to scan just about any book and make it available to this community. Ensure that only people with qualifying disabilities get access to these books.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 10, 2014

Braille books saved her from isolation and she became an insatiable reader. However, she soon encountered the frustrating “accessible book famine” because very few books available were available in Braille. We’re a technology company and strongly believe in the power of information as a force for good.

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Tech Soup

OCTOBER 28, 2013

People rely on their neighborhood library to borrow books, magazines, and movies. Most recently, PCL has been a trailblazer in providing mobile technology to their patrons, redefining what library services means. Offer a subscription to an eBook program for kids so that librarians can use iPads to hold story times.

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Tech Soup

NOVEMBER 14, 2013

As we hurtle toward the end of 2013, it’s time for an update of nonprofit technology trends and news! If you’re a nonprofit news junkie, have a look at all our Nonprofit Technology News pieces from this past year. TechSoup Technologies for Good. Hacker Helper is all about not reinventing the technology wheel.

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