Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

I occasionally get invited to small group brainstorms of key leaders in fields where we’re active (and we’re active in a lot of fields!). I’m on the plane home from one such weekend in Providence, Rhode Island, held at Brown University. The Think Different Summit was 15-20 smart people, led by an experienced facilitator, trying to imagine the future of the learning disability rights movement. The outcomes of the brainstorm aren’t for me to share, although I look forward to tweeting/blogging as some of these results hit the web. But, I can share the excitement of being part of this process and some of the things I learned. For one thing, it was the first meeting with a major presence of adults with avowed learning disabilities. Of course, with the prevalence of people with learning disabilities in the population being one in four or five, they’ve been part of probably every meeting I’ve ever been to! But, these leaders were “out” about their disability. And so, the first insight fo...

The news is excellent. We just announced: Encyclopaedia Britannica Grants Digital Rights to Bookshare -- Major Reference Collections Now Accessible for Individuals with Print Disabilities Worldwide . Although it was possible, we never seriously thought about scanning the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Thanks to the support of the EB team, we now have direct access to digital versions of many important reference series, along with the ability to provide these books to people with qualifying print disabilities in Canada, the UK, India and all over the world! Our dream at Bookshare has been that every student with a print disability has accessible versions of every book that would be available to their peers without disabilities. We have already gotten close on trade books: juvenile and teen literature. We're working very hard on textbooks. This agreement gives us access to the last major frontier of equal access: reference works.