Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

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. I’m thrilled to share with you some of the recent amazing impact of Bookshare , a Benetech Global Literacy initiative and the largest accessible online library of copyrighted content for people with print disabilities. Recently Bookshare has reached two major milestones in its efforts to bring reading equality to disadvantaged populations around the world. First, Bookshare’s collection has surpassed a quarter of a million titles and, in fact, is growing so rapidly that at the time of writing this post it is almost at 300,000 titles! Thousands of ebooks are pouring into the collection each month thanks to the dedication of our volunteers around the world and partnerships with more than 500 socially responsible publishers who donate their digital files. Bookshare titles range from vocationa...

Guest Beneblog by  Betsy Beaumon, VP and General Manager, Benetech’s Global Literacy Program. Betsy Beaumon I recently had the honor to speak at the first-ever Braille Summit , hosted on June 19-21, 2013 by the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) and Perkins School for the Blind. With the goal of promoting braille literacy, this landmark meeting brought together braille experts from around the world to Perkins’ campus in Watertown, Massachusetts. My biggest takeaway from the summit: the time could not be more urgent, and more hopeful, for the future of braille and the prospects of those who need it. That’s why braille is an important focus for us in Benetech’s Global Literacy Program — we know that we must keep braille relevant and make it more available. One of the biggest reasons is that among people who are blind, braille literacy has been linked with higher education levels, higher likelihood of employment and higher income. Accor...

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...

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...

Thanks to incredible work on the part of socially responsible publishers, our volunteers and the Bookshare team, we've been adding books at at incredible rate: more than 10,000 books in the last month. As a result, I recently received the following complaint letter from one of our long-term members, Chancey Fleet: Jim, I would like to register a complaint! Bookshare is piling on books faster than I can read the titles. Ever since I was a kid, I was a title glutton. I went through every catalog the NLS had and every Braille Book Review. I did the same later with Web Braille, and whole months have gone by during which I knew every book that hit the collection. This was viable, maybe even adaptive behaviour in a climate of scarcity. I could pluck out a handful of the finite number of books on offer and leave the rest, and if I didn’t have absolute choice, I at least got to be sure I wasn’t missing anything. Not. Anymore. Bookshare is adding so much content that favourite authors of m...

A Guest Beneblog by Viji Dilip, This summer I visited the International Institute of Social Entrepreneurship (IISE) . Situated on the banks of the Vellayani fresh water lake, on the outskirts on Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, India , IISE is a testimony to social enterprise at its very best. This is another venture of Sabriye Tenberken and Paul Kronenberg who founded Braille without Borders in Lhasa, Tibet. IISE is an institute that has been established to train participants (age 18+) who have the right initiative, motivation and potential to establish and run their own social projects. Paul took great pride in showing me around the three acre campus that has been built with eco-friendly materials . He has incorporated rain water harvesting, solar water-heaters, bio glass plants, “Nothing is wasted here, not even human waste” joked Paul. The campus, that feels like a holiday resort and an university at the same time houses the International Institute of Social Entrepreneurs. Sabriye...

Sometimes you come across something cool and relevant to your work. I couldn't resist getting a couple of the new Louis Braille silver dollars. They have an image of Louis Braille (this is his bicentennial year) and actual raised dots (for the letters BRL which is the code for Braille) on the back of the coin. The National Federation of the Blind convinced the federal government to have the U.S. Mint strike and sell these Louis Braille Silver Dollars , and some of the money goes to supporting Braille literacy. I've been using a Morgan silver dollar from the 19th century when I referee soccer games each fall: this September I plan to surprise the kids with a Braille silver dollar!

Spotted this photo of Benetech's Robin Seaman visiting the Helen Keller archive at the American Foundation for the Blind and holding an Oscar. Helen Keller received this Oscar for the documentary about her life in 1955, as mentioned in the online Helen Keller Kids Museum . One of the great things about working for Benetech is being able to see all the cool things going on around the world. Looking at the 17 volumes of Helen's Braille Bible, I remember why Bookshare members love having a thousand times more content on a two pound Braille electronic display!

Today is Louis Braille's 200th birthday, and there's been a great deal of coverage for the inventor of the premier reading system for the blind. The former British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, published a piece for the BBC called Why Braille is brilliant today. The National Federation of the Blind is organizing events around the country to celebrate his birthday and the invention of Braille . It helps blind people all over the world, as this recent sample of Hindi Braille demonstrates. We're very proud at Bookshare.org about our support of Braille. We believe that digital Braille displays combined with Bookshare really make Braille much more practical. What power when you can carry around an entire library of Braille books that weights only two pounds!

The Beijing School for the Blind dates back to the 19th century, back in the days where the colonial presence was strong. The facilities are impressive, more or less brand new. The principal of the school, proudly showed off plans to expand the campus over the next few years, with high quality architectural site drawings that would have looked perfectly in place in Chicago. Our team toured the school. Like many of the agencies we visited, China is also experiencing a significant increase in kids with multiple disabilities. So, in Hong Kong and in Beijing we saw sensory stimulation rooms for these children. These were quite familiar to folks like Frank Simpson of the Lavelle School in New York and Miki Jordan of the Junior Blind of America in Los Angeles. We visited the English language classroom. We enjoyed getting a chance to chat with a couple of the students who were impressively fluent. We were treated to a funny skit about Chinese tour guides for the Olympics. As we headed ou...

The China Braille Press was another impressive visit. Not only do they produce Braille in quantity, but the Press is also developing affordable technology for blind people such as screenreaders and talking ebook players. It's always a thrill to meet a new group that could be solely a traditional nonprofit, but is clearly thinking like a social enterprise! The facility was several buildings in a compound on the outskirts of Beijing. The Wanping area it is in is being preserved. Apparently, the Sino-Japanese war in the 1930s started nearby, at the Marco Polo Bridge. We visited a room full of Braille transcriptionists, mainly working on textbooks. The software they use was apparently written at the Press. You can see Braille visually on the PC screen appearing as they type. For high volume production, special metal plates are made. A programmed machine was punching the Braille into the plates. The Press has several Braille presses, including one they built themselves. We also g...