Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 3, 2013

In what is known as the “ braille provision ,” the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 2004 mandates that the teams who help write educational plans for students with disabilities presume that all blind and visually impaired children should be taught Braille unless it is determined to be inappropriate. Accordingly, U.S.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 16, 2014

My personal goal is to channel the aspirations of the technology community to do more social good. More and more of my time is spent around both raising money and raising awareness of how much more could be done with technology to increase social impact. Consider third grade student Brennan Draves.

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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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Literacy eBook United Kingdom Accessibility 158

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. Blog Action Day is today, October 15, and the international community of bloggers is blogging about this year’s theme, The Power of We.

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Library Student eBook Accessibility 164

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 5, 2015

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 experience helped us prove the potential of Bookshare to meet the needs of students with disabilities. Even in the United States, this was true of probably a quarter of our student users.

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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. The most common error is a school signing up all of their students with visual impairments and all learning disabilities.

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Copyright Social Law Student 158

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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Celebrate Google Literacy Library 145

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 27, 2013

In my contribution to Ron’s book, I discuss the framework that guides us at Benetech, the technology nonprofit I lead. When I first started pursuing the idea of using technology to solve challenging social problems, it was a pretty radical idea.

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Develop Social Library eBook 144

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. Thanks again!

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Literacy Program United Arab Emirates Student 166

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 10, 2014

This reality changed when both Kevin and Sophia learned about the accessible online library Bookshare , an initiative of Silicon Valley technology nonprofit Benetech. With its rapidly growing collection of over 225,000 (and counting) accessible ebooks, Bookshare is the world’s largest library of its kind.

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Data Classroom Measure Accessibility 168

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 3, 2016

Since people with disabilities tend to be the poorest of the poor, it seems odd to campaign to hobble libraries that serve only this community. I hope they follow the lead of the great majority of these countries and allow libraries serving that community to be fully stocked with the needed accessible books!

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Qgiv

MARCH 30, 2022

Carolyn is a major gift fundraiser and nonprofit communications expert who uses technology to amplify her impact and do more with less. Carolyn has been part of the Qgiv extended family since 2019—we proudly partner to help make a difference in our communities. Q: Are there community resources available?

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 10, 2009

But, it's a dream that the commercial ebook vendors keep dashing. We have an action by Amazon that sets back years of work to make ebooks accessible. If Kindle ebooks were available on the Web, other developers could fix many of its limitations such as lousy support for images, problems with complex layouts, inaccessibility.

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Amazon Accessibility eBook Problem 100

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. copyright law. In the U.S.,

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Copyright Law Accessibility Library 196

Tech Soup

JUNE 4, 2014

A panel of community advisors reviewed the submissions, and chose 25 finalists – all of whom won significant grants. The finalists are an impressive roster of charities from diverse fields doing great work in nonprofit technology. Students develop and run a business, gain confidence, academic support, and mentorship.

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Connection Cafe

MAY 28, 2015

In the end, it’s all about social good, about investing in the fabric of our communities to make them better, about finding new, different and often more compelling ways to volunteer, to serve. If you need some final inspiration, check out this eBook we produced with A Billion+Change and Riggs Partners to celebrate #GivingTuesday.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 5, 2016

The common link among our projects is information technology, which can be applied to just about every aspect of the social sector. Yet, nonprofits frequently lag behind the for-profit world in applying technology to their work. Benetech has a unique opportunity to repeatedly use technology as a social change agent.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 28, 2011

We provide accessible ebooks that can be spoken aloud, turned into Braille or large print. We serve over 150,000 students with disabilities alone with free online services funded by the Department of Education (however, nothing contained in this post has anything to do with our funders). We do it for human rights groups.

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eBook China Copyright Library 277

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

DECEMBER 8, 2011

We provide accessible ebooks that can be spoken aloud, turned into Braille or large print. We serve over 150,000 students with disabilities alone with free online services funded by the Department of Education (however, nothing contained in this post has anything to do with our funders). We do it for human rights groups.

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eBook Copyright China Law 107

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 11, 2013

Developing Open Source Software For Social Good For example, in the last few months, individual employees have used volunteer hours to create fun interactive, online learning tools for educators and students using Mozilla’s Webmaker. And, in so doing, we can help amplify the real, global impact they have on the lives of real people every day.

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Connection Cafe

DECEMBER 22, 2013

It’s a platform to connect, to earn trust, and for even the most reluctant of supporters to discover just how much they want to be a part of your community. The advice in this post is a compilation of suggestions offered up by social media professionals involved in Ryan’s Google+ community. Or free sodas.

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