Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

The View from an Authorized Entity  Many Bookshare users (and potential Bookshare users!) have been asking about the Treaty of Marrakesh (formal name: The Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works by Visually Impaired Persons and Persons with Print Disabilities. What’s in it; what does it mean; how does it affect Bookshare members? In the popular online acronym, IANAL (I am not a lawyer). However, as the founder of the Bookshare online library, we have a great deal at stake in how the Treaty gets implemented. Although it might seem like a complicated document , we’re really excited about it because we think it will greatly improve global access for people with bona fide print disabilities. Here’s our laymen’s take on the major provisions of the Treaty. The Treaty of Marrakesh, Top Issues: What’s the goal of the Treaty? The goal of the Treaty is to end the book famine for people who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print disabled. Ultimately, t...

To the Diplomatic Conference in Plenary on  June 27, 2013 On the Adoption of the Treaty of Marrakech This is an excellent Treaty . The Benetech team is delighted by its adoption today. We have the technology, we have the content, and now we have the legal framework to make it possible for every person with a print disability on the planet to get access to the books they need for education, employment and social inclusion! At Benetech , we like to think of ourselves as part of Silicon Valley’s heart. We are a high tech organization that is not organized as a for-profit company, but instead as a nonprofit charitable corporation working to ensure technology serves all of humanity. Our goal is not to make money for private interests, but instead to use technology to maximize social good. For years, we have been working to end the worldwide book famine. This Treaty provides a tremendous tool to accelerate that work. It is our hope that Benetech’s Bookshare library, the a...

Statement of Benetech to the 20th Session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights at the World Intellectual Property Organization June 23, 2010, Geneva, Switzerland • My nonprofit organization, Benetech, operates Bookshare, the largest online library for people with print disabilities, with the mission of bringing accessible books to all people with print disabilities around the world • We have roughly 100,000 members in the U.S. with print disabilities, with more than 70,000 copyrighted works in our library, the majority of which have been created under the US copyright exception by volunteers, mainly people with disabilities themselves, helping each other. • At Bookshare, we have been very sensitive to the complaints of blind and print disabled people around the world, feeling that they have been unfairly denied access to our extensive collection o My explanation that it’s simply copyright law doesn’t make them feel any better • We would like a binding instrument so...

I'm here in Geneva for the 20th Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights meeting. This is the international forum for discussing copyright issues, and it is the body considering the Treaty for the Visually Impaired (TVI). Jamie Love of KEI took the above picture of ACB's Eric Bridges, NFB's Scott LaBarre (and his wife Anahit Galechyan) and me at the meeting: I was busy tweeting what I was hearing at my Twitter handle of @JRandomF. Hot issue this week are the now four proposals on solving the problem of access to print by people with print disabilities globally: The TVI: the treaty sponsored originally by the World Blind Union and supported at WIPO by Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay and Mexico. [I was one of the co-drafters of the treaty language] The U.S. draft Joint Recommendation The EU draft Joint Recommendation The African broader Treaty draft Look forward to updating on Twitter what's happening.

We got great feedback about our announcement a couple of weeks ago about doing open content textbooks for K-12, thanks for funding from the US Department of Education. How were we going to top that one? By announcing we're doing open content college textbooks with Flat World Knowledge, a cool for-profit startup. I mentioned meeting one of their key people at BYU last month in a recent Beneblog post . The announcement got a ton of pickup: more than a dozen stories came out, including one at Publishers Weekly . Why am I so excited? Because open content scores on so many counts. For Bookshare, these are high quality textbooks that are free to everybody on the planet, that we can adapt to be highly accessible for people with disabilities. Because they are covered by open content licenses, we don't have to have people prove they have qualifying disabilities. Parents, teachers, teachers-in-training, people with disabilities, people who can't read, people who just want t...

We filed the following comments to the Copyright Office's request for comments on issues about access for people with print disabilities. Background on this can be reviewed at the Knowledge Ecology International website. December 4, 2009 Benetech’s Reply Comments in response to the Copyright Office Notice of Inquiry and Request for Comments on the Topic of Facilitating Access to Copyrighted Works for the Blind or Other Persons With Disabilities The issue all comes down to human rights vs. money. The human rights issue we’re discussing are the human rights of people with disabilities that cannot effectively use the printed word. The printed word is essential for education, employment and social inclusion. The status quo is that people with print disabilities are experiencing a book famine. And famines have consequences. Most of this community doesn’t have access to formal education, most of this community doesn’t have access to jobs and most of this community isn’t recognized by l...

Just spent a week in Washington DC doing all kinds of things, including actual lobbying (it's fun!) as well as meeting with our Bookshare funders at the Department of Education. One of the coolest meetings was with Under Secretary of Education, Martha Kanter, who headed our local community college here in California before getting the appointment. She and her senior policy adviser, Hal Plotkin, are huge fans of Open Educational Resources (OERs), having been involved in starting that movement in community colleges. Our new announcement about the Department granting Bookshare supplemental funding to convert open content textbooks to accessible formats went over very well. We're promising to do highly accessible versions of 80 open content textbooks. There's even a quote from Governor Schwarzenegger in the press release! Accessibility is a huge asset of open content materials, which are frequently released under the Creative Commons licenses and are freely distributable...

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.

We had a nice piece on Bookshare in the latest AARP Bulletin, entitled: Making Books Accessible for Those With Disabilities. We've been getting lots of questions about the article, including volunteer offers (yay!) and interest in getting Bookshare for older parents. We have shared with people that it's ok for children of disabled parents to download books for their parents, just as it's ok for parents to download books for children with disabilities. Our team has been explaining how to assist a disabled senior who doesn't have a PC, by empowering a PC-using child to download the book and load it onto a device like a Victor Stream (an ebook player that has a voice synthesizer that speaks our books). These kinds of devices are much more like the tape recorders and CD players with which non-PC users are familiar. Of course, we explain that access to Bookshare is only for the purpose of helping a person with a print disability. It's always exciting to be covered in...

Lots of excitement recently in Geneva at the World Intellectual Property Organization. We've been supportive of an effort by the World Blind Union to get an international treaty in place that sets up a global system much like the one we have today in the United States. I was part of an expert panel that drafted the original proposed treaty. Bookshare pretty much has been made possible by the Chafee Amendment, a copyright exception provision in U.S. law that made it legal for us to scan just a bout any book without needing to get permissions first. The goal of the treaty is to set a standard that all countries have such a provision, and that they interact with other countries. Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay joined together to propose that WIPO consider this treaty. During the meeting in Geneva, there was worrisome rhetoric coming from the advocacy community, like the Boing Boing post USA, Canada and the EU attempt to kill treaty to protect blind people's access to written ma...

Another exciting milestone has happened with the Bookshare collection. Thanks to tremendous work by our volunteers, our publisher partners, our proofreading partners and our staff, we've added more than 4,000 books in the last two months and broken the 50,000 titles barrier. Now, I sure wasn't expecting us to add books at this rate! We've been adding books at more than 1000 books a month earlier this year, and I think that rate is definitely sustainable. Can't wait to see what happens the rest of 2009 with the incredible book juggernaut we've got going. And, we don't lose sight of the equality we're striving to deliver. Just minutes ago I received an email forwarded from our team from a user in Puerto Rico telling us that our response to her rush request for a book had just helped her pass her final exam. She rained down blessings on the Bookshare team for helping her out. That's why we're all doing this!

I'm going to be heading to Washington DC this week to give a talk at the National Press Club on Bookshare and our new partnerships with universities and publishers. We've just been able to confirm Allan Adler of the Association of American Publishers as one of the participants. Should be very interesting. On my last trip to DC, I was very happy to be showing off the above graph. We're signing up students for Bookshare at a rate of more than 3,000 per month, and this means we're well ahead of our goal which was about 1700 students a month to hit our 100,000 students over five year goal. The entire Bookshare team is very proud of this!

Bookshare looks for publishers to partner with us to make books more available to people with disabilities. It's very exciting that we can announce that one of the largest book groups in the United States has just made the commitment: Hachette Book Group Partners with Bookshare To Make Thousands of Books Available to People with Print Disabilities . Hachette Book Group publishes under quite a number of famous imprints, such as Little Brown and Company and Grand Central. According to the company, they had a record 107 books on the New York Times bestseller list in 2008, with 35 of them ranked #1. By gaining access to these books directly from Hachette, we don't have to go through our typical time-consuming process of chopping, scanning and proofreading the books. They will be sending the books to us in high quality XML formats that we can turn into DAISY and Braille digital files. We're really excited about the social responsibility that Hachette has demonstrated throu...

Over the weekend just ended we successfully launched the completely rebuilt Bookshare website. The original Bookshare website and service was created over seven years ago, and has served us well. But, our new Bookshare for Education project with its likely prospect of increasing our student users one hundredfold meant we needed a rebuild. I'm also excited about our new logo! The new features built in are too many for me to list in a short blog post, but our team has prepared a brief on the new Accessibility and Ease of Use features . Big news includes: Many new accessibility features Brand new talking software from HumanWare and Don Johnston High quality text-to-speech Extensive features for schools to manage student memberships, including an easy way for a school to recommend a student gets their own personal membership (their own unlimited use library card) Expanded and enhanced volunteer functions to make adding new books easier Replacing our proprietary compression softwar...

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 ...

Earlier this week I was invited to speak on an on-line conference by the Friends of Benetech, an independent support group for our Bookshare.org digital library for people with print disabilities. They have a neat technology for an on-line audio and text chat room. There were more than fifty people on-line with us, and the entire talk was recorded and placed on the web. I love this kind of opportunity that technology makes possible. Any Bookshare.org user or volunteer now gets the chance to question the CEO of a service they care passionately about (and believe me, they do!). Would other nonprofit agencies operate differently if the people they served had a regular chance to question the leadership directly and frequently? Greater accountability is essential to progress in the social sector: this is just one start. Earned income is another way, of course. I'm looking forward to doing this regularly in the future: it keeps me on my toes!