Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

Last November, Mayrie ReNae, a beloved colleague and part of our Bookshare extended community, passed away after a battle with cancer. Mayrie was a Bookshare member, volunteer and staff person, who contributed hundreds of books to the Bookshare collection and provided invaluable guidance to our volunteer crew for many years. This week, in remembrance of her birthday, we are pleased to announce the creation of the Mayrie ReNae Annual Valentine's Day Scholarship . Through this scholarship, Bookshare will donate one new membership every Valentine’s Day to a person with financial need. Mayrie, who was blind, began working with Bookshare as a volunteer in August 2006 and earned her membership by scanning and submitting books to the collection. By the time she was hired as a proofreader and scanner in December 2008, Mayrie had played a key role in contributing more than 1,000 accessible books to the collection. She said her primary motivation when starting out with Bookshare was to ...

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. Benetech’s Bookshare library is living proof that real, transformative change happens through partnerships and by helping people unleash their talents and energies. It is the Power of We that changes the way we create transformative positive change. Blog Action Day is today, October 15, and the international community of bloggers is blogging about this year’s theme, The Power of We. I’m excited to contribute to this topic in honor of the multitudes who work together to make a difference in the world through Bookshare, a global asset we have built with joint efforts of education, technology, publishing, student, parent, and volunteer communities. 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. W...

I just attended two days of meetings in Washington DC on the first year of the DIAGRAM Center , held at the Office of Special Education Programs in the Department of Education. The goal of the DIAGRAM R&D Center is to greatly improve access to graphical information for students with print disabilities (for example, helping blind students get access to important graphics inside textbooks). 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. Of course, just as we're solving the text problem, more and more content is moving to richer, more visual forms like graphics, simulations and flash! The first exciting part of our work has been delivered by the National Center on Accessible Media, one of our two key partners in DIAGRAM (along with the DAISY Consortium). The initial part of the project was to do a detailed survey of existing assistive technology...