Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

Brownbag lunches are a regular feature at Benetech, and one of our most popular regular speakers is Bookshare team member Liz Halperin. Liz had just gotten back from getting her new guide dog, Welton. She told an enthralled audience all about the ten stages of guide dog training and the process of being matched up with a dog. Her prior guide dog had not been all that successful and she had to switch after just two years (5-9 being more typical for the length of guiding service). The highlight of the talk was when she took the apparently mellow Wellie off his harness and then he dashed around the room to be petted by 30-40 people. The funniest thing was her description of her prior dog's love of eating paper: the dog actually ate her Benetech paycheck. Our CFO, Teresa Throckmorton, explained that she switched Liz to being paid by wire transfers. As a dog owner, I know that they can sometimes chew through money, but this was ridiculous!

Schools are back in session, and with them millions of American children who struggle daily to learn using traditional printed books. Having learning disabilities or various learning differences, they need alternative reading environments that rely on their strengths rather than on their weaknesses. This includes accessible educational materials, such as e-books that can be used with computers, or mobile devices that display enlarged text or read the book aloud while also highlighting text. We have the technological innovations to help these children and their families and educators, who are looking for strategies to aid their success. Yet, we are still far from where we need to be in order to give them equal opportunity to succeed in school and beyond. In September 2007, the U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) selected our successful Bookshare library as the provider of accessible materials to every student in the U.S. with a legally qualifying pri...

I originally started this blog as a way to keep more of our Benetech team aware of what was going on with me and other team members (through guest blogs) while on our travels. Many of us spend a big chunk of our time on the road rather than in the office, and it's good to share some of the reasons our office chairs are often empty! Speaking publicly is an important part of our work. We do it both to advance Benetech objectives and projects, as well as advancing the field (we call these karma gigs). We invest in public speaking coaching (thanks, Melinda Henning!) to become better speakers, both for old hands like me and Benetechers getting ready for their first public speech. I asked Joan Mellea, who keeps track of these and many other things at Benetech, about my upcoming speaking commitments: she quickly came up with fifteen! More than ten of these are in just the next two months. So, I thought I'd share what's coming up to give a flavor of where in the world Jim will b...

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.

We’ve been exploring the area of sustainability a great deal lately. We have some new ideas for software Benetech could be developing. But, one of our core values is to see what’s already out there and to not duplicate great work already being done. That means we frequently run into cool projects (and mentally check the box: taken care of!). In this exploration effort, thanks to John Danner, the incredibly connected entrepreneur who hangs his hat occasionally at the Haas Business School in Berkeley, I was able to meet Dr. Ron Dembo, founder of Zerofootprint. Ron showed me a brief demo at TED and we followed up with a more extensive demonstration more recently. Zerofootprint is working to make a dent in minimizing climate change, by changing people’s behavior. And, it’s not clear that making the scientific case is sufficient for people to change. But the reality is that people don’t even need to buy the scientific case for climate change to take actions that address the issue: wo...

I'm very excited to be a guest editor with the awesome Donna McNear on next year's special technology issue of the Journal of Vision Impairment and Blindness . JVIB is the peer-reviewed journal of record in the field of vision loss, and a past tech issue in 2003 featured my article, In the Palm of Your Hand, a vision of what mobile devices would mean for blind people in the future (a future that has already happened, of course!). Donna and I are looking for forward looking articles that will inform the field of what might happen in the future. Technology is advancing at such a pace that so many topics are possible, but to just name a few: Mobile (what might happen next!?) Web infrastructure and accessibility of/through the cloud The power of free New technology for giving blind people the ability to tackle tasks that used to require vision Convergence between mainstream technology and assistive technology Novel and/or innovative applications of technology for teaching an...

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...