Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

We're really proud of the rapid growth of our Bookshare online library for people with print disabilities. We're up to more than 125,000 users, with over 95,000 books available, and our users are now accessing content at a rate of more than million downloads per year! That's why it's painful to hear about disputes over denying students with very real print disabilities access to these resources. I've recently been corresponding with a mother whose son's school district seems to be suing them to deny access to accessible material. She asked me to comment on a bunch of issues around Bookshare, and we prepared the comments below. I'm really hoping more information will help resolve these kinds of disputes: I'm often surprised at the things I hear from the field. Statement on Bookshare January 24, 2011 Response to Request for Information Benetech, the nonprofit parent of the Bookshare online library for people with print disabilities, is responding to a...

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...

As part of the large national award we received from the Department of Education, we are spending a lot more time in Washington. I talk to lots of folks: congressional staff, members of Congress, folks at the Department of Education, the publishers, disability activists and so on. I hope to provide a little flavor of what this is like, since as an engineer and not-very-political-guy, this is new to me. But, like many social entrepreneurs, I'm beginning to figure out that being absent from the halls of policy is not serving our mission. I had the chance to meet with Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa last month, and tell him about Bookshare.org for ten minutes. I was surprised to find he was aware of the controversy around the big Bookshare.org award and asked sharp questions about how we were dealing with challenges around delivering on this. He is a huge figure in disability policy, and it was an honor to get to talk to him about what we're doing. The biggest issue I'm still ...

I just got back from the ATIA conference, which included meetings of the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS) committees. ATIA is one of the biggest assistive technology conferences of the year and we had many exciting conversations about Bookshare.org for Education (B4E, our $32 million five year project to deliver accessible books to every student with a print disability in the U.S.). Betsy Burgess, Susie McKinnon and I spent lots of time talking to state agencies, universities and teachers about B4E. It was a blast, given that we've more than quadrupled the number of students we're serving in less than four months! Plus, Bookshare.org just past 36,000 books on-line, and 37,000 will likely happen within a month. Right after the award for B4E, I gave a keynote at the NCTI conference in DC that went over well. The full talk should be available soon, but eSchoolNews has a short version up on their website . I'm looking forward to making more...