Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

The Benetech team has just bid goodbye to VP of Engineering Gerardo Capiel, who is moving on to his next adventure. A passionate technology-for-good advocate, Gerardo has made major contributions to Benetech’s social mission since he joined us over four years ago. As we are getting ready to welcome a new VP of Engineering, I’d like to acknowledge and thank Gerardo for his many contributions and their lasting impact on the lives of the people we serve. Gerardo helped Benetech dramatically increase our capacity to benefit larger populations by scaling our services, revamping our innovation process, and establishing a thriving network of industry partners and volunteers. He oversaw the development of numerous products and services that allow us to drive social empowerment through technology across all our programs. He also championed an open source ethos so that our work can be broadly shared (you can view all our open source projects on GitHub ). Gerardo’s contributions related to th...

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. At Benetech, where innovation is the engine behind our mission, we did our best to make the most of it and help lead the charge into the future. Bookshare and our other Access to Literacy initiatives, including the DIAGRAM Center and Route 66 Literacy, all made big strides this year through the significant dedication of the community that makes it all happen. We celebrated the tenth anniversary of Bookshare—both online and with in real life—with gatherings of users, volunteers, partners, employees, and friends throughout the year. As we get older, some of us like to increase the length and number of celebrations for our own birthdays, so why not apply this to Bookshare too? Af...

Benetech has long been a pioneer in providing innovative services to people with print disabilities. 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. The Poet application developed by DIAGRAM helps level the playing field by making otherwise inaccessible graphic content available for students and other readers who cannot read traditional books. Poet supports image descriptions for electronic books created in the international DAISY standard for digital talking books and will be compatible with descriptions for ebooks in the EPUB3 format. The DIAGRAM Center team has also created an image data content model which will provide standards to define and enhance the efficacy and interoperability of accessible images as the project evolves. DIAGRAM stands for Digital Image and Graphics Resources for Accessible Materials. Our DIAGRAM ...

President’s Update Fall 2011 Don’t be surprised, but we’re picking up the pace of change at Benetech! The world’s problems are many, and we keep seeing opportunities for technologists to address those problems effectively. Our team has been thinking hard about scaling positive social impact of technology work. I want to unveil several of these new initiatives, as well as sneaking in some of the incredible things happening in our core programs in literacy and human rights. Highlights of this Letter: SocialCoding4Good CityOptions Read2Go and Route 66 Literacy Selected Program Updates Human rights: Legal victory in Guatemala, PBS NewsHour stories Literacy: Major milestones for Bookshare at home and abroad SocialCoding4Good Just funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, our SocialCoding4Good initiative will kick off later this year. Led by Benetech’s VP of Engineering Gerardo Capiel, we will create an online space, SocialCoding4Good, where people in the tech community intereste...

Gerardo Capiel, Benetech's VP Engineering, just sent me a couple of exciting screen shots on our Read2Go iOS application for accessible reading of ebooks. The first one shows the Special Education category on iTunes, with the Read2Go logo being used to represent the Literacy and Learning section. And, the second one shows why: our Read2Go application is at the top of the Literacy and Learning section! We also are just about through the process with the first major upgrade to Read2Go since its release, with a bunch of fixes and improvements requested by our users.

Benetech got a call recently from an excited Bookshare member who had been waiting to download our new Read2Go accessible e-book application for Apple devices. Graduate student Maria Georgakarakou, who is blind, gave us a rave review for the Read2Go app which allows those with print disabilities to listen to books in the DAISY audio format. Maria was especially excited about Read2Go’s navigation features that allow her to search and download accessible e-books from our Bookshare library directly to her iPad and iPhone. In addition to being a Bookshare member, Maria is a book scanner and volunteer proofreader. She predicted that the usability of Read2Go will encourage Bookshare members to read more books in the DAISY audio format. Maria also noted that students like herself are finding more scholarly books on Bookshare which expands her ability to research. Maria is a historical musicologist who is pursuing her PhD at Boston University. She studies secular songs and theater mus...