Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

I’m delighted to share with you today a wonderful success story from our Volunteer Program . UC Santa Cruz students who participated in our volunteer pilot project— proofreading textbooks for our Bookshare collection—have done a fantastic job proofreading over a short period of time three entire textbooks! This means more than 2,300 pages of text and an amazing gift for the 250,000+ Bookshare student members we serve. Our Volunteer Program Manager Brenda Hendricksen and Volunteer Program Coordinator Madeleine Linares have been working on this pilot project with UC Santa Cruz Professor of Computer Engineering Roberto Manduchi . Professor Manduchi, whose research focuses on assistive technology for persons with visual impairments, is an old friend of mine. Several months ago, he approached me and offered to involve his entire class in proofreading Bookshare textbooks. I’m delighted this idea has turned into a successful project with such a splendid outcome! A group of over 40 of R...

The annual observance of the International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPD) is today, December 3rd. The Day aims to raise awareness of disability issues with a focus on the rights of persons with disabilities and the benefits derived from their integration in the social, economic, cultural and political life of their communities. People with disabilities make up an estimated 15% of the world’s population of 7 billion, and they remain largely marginalized and affected by discrimination and unemployment, among other significant difficulties. The theme of IDPD 2011 is “Together for a better world for all: Including persons with disabilities in development.” This year, for the first time, IDPD is commemorated with supporting sub-themes (see the full list here ), to draw attention to key issues that come into play in the intersection of disability and development processes. One of these sub-themes is “Accessibility: removing barriers and promoting disability-inclusive development.” O...

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'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...

I liked what our Bookshare team did for their electronic holiday card!