Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

What is it like for a nonprofit to have a successful, lasting partnership with a private philanthropic foundation? And what are some of the social benefits and impact that may result from such a relationship? At Benetech, we’re fortunate to have had long-time support from funders who have been willing to bet on us. One foundation that has been a committed supporter of our work is the Lavelle Fund for the Blind . I’d like to share our experience with Lavelle, where they took a series of calculated risks in grantmaking. The Lavelle Fund exemplifies the tremendous social return that bold philanthropy can create. Embracing measured risk, The Fund has been willing to make early bets on Benetech, and has repeatedly chosen to invest in our prototype projects. These projects ended up becoming successful and found sustainable funding streams, allowing the innovation to go to scale without needing continued funding from Lavelle. That’s what a lot of foundations would love to see happen: i...

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...

One of the reasons I started the Beneblog more than ten years ago (!) was to keep the Benetech team in the loop. As someone who travels roughly half the time, it’s important to provide some insight into what’s going on, especially since these meetings often influence where Benetech goes with our efforts. So, this is an in-depth report on the two days I just spent at the end of last week in Geneva. To paraphrase Mark Twain, I didn’t have time to write a short blog post, so I wrote a long one. This is totally the “how sausage and law are made” view, so don’t read this unless you want to know more about global accessibility in detail! The context We’ve been supporting the World Blind Union and other groups in the pursuit of a Treaty for the Visually Impaired for the last five or six years. The nexus for this work is the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the United Nations agency that deals with such matters. The Marrakesh Treaty was signed last year, and now the e...

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 ...

People with print disabilities around the world have a right to high-quality ebooks that they can read with assistive technology. Benetech’s Bookshare library continues to expand its international service providing accessible books and publications to members in more than 30 countries. Our international Bookshare service recently announced new partnerships with three organizations that are reaching out to readers with print disabilities in their home countries. These partners include the Norwegian Library of Talking Books and Braille (NLB), the Hoerbuecherei des OSBV Talking Book Library in Austria, and the Dorina Nowill Foundation in Brazil.
 Benetech looks forward to working with all these groups to provide the latest books, especially textbooks (primarily in English). 
These ebooks can quickly be turned into Braille, large print or be read aloud by a synthetic voice synthesizer. Bookshare International members now have access to more than 50,000 titles, including books in Spanis...

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.

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...

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...

A guest Beneblog by Lindsie Verma of the Bookshare Team Hot Fall Sun hangs low Cooling breeze ruffles oak tree Beneath, small boy reads. And now, as an old man, that boy is still reading. Thanks! –Don Meyer, Bookshare user. We get a lot of emails from happy users, but never before have we received gratitude in Haiku-form! When we asked Don for permission to post his haiku, he said, "It was very gratifying to find that you, and your team, enjoyed the haiku. As I said to you before, that boy was me. Even now I can still see the sunlight filtering through the oak trees, the shadows, the life that surrounded me as I read poetry under the oaks in front of Crown Point Country School. Even as early as the third grade I had learned to sit quietly and observe everything with the whole of my body, all senses. I did not start to write poetry until my late thirties, though, when, finally, all the bottled up emotions began to emerge. I know, now, that my 'journey of a...

We've worked with O'Reilly Media for a long time. They were the first publisher to sign on to deliver their books electronically to Bookshare back in 2003, and gave us permission to provide their books outside the U.S. We take their files and convert them to the DAISY format which is a digital format designed specifically to create accessible materials for people with print disabilities. The big advantage of DAISY over typical scanned files is that DAISY includes much more extensive navigation (chapters, sections, page numbers, etc.). More and more publishers are asking that we return to them the DAISY files we create. We're excited about this trend and the opportunities it creates for the commercial availability of mass market accessible books. O'Reilly is again leading the charge. Check out this O'Reilly's announcement that their ebook bundles now include DAISY talking book format files to see the fabulous work they're doing. Why is this a big deal? Beca...

I just got back from a terrific week in Austria at the International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs conference. This is an academic conference on access technology, full of researchers trying out new things that will help people with disabilities. My first day was hanging out at the Young Researchers seminar, which was organized by Professors Paul Blenkhorn (the UK's first professor of access tech) and the ICCHP host Klaus Miesenberger. It was fun to hear students and fresh Ph.Ds talking about their research. I gave the opening keynote, on my main new theme, Raising the Floor. The goal is to get more people working to make this happen: getting access tech to every person in the world who needs it. People from all over Europe talked to me about their dreams for improved accessibility. And, there were many projects that definitely fell under the RTF umbrella. I met the developer behind WebVisum, which is getting much attention from blind people for ...