Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

An Insider Reveals How the Latest Hot Books Are Added to Bookshare’s Collection of Accessible Titles A Guest Beneblog by Liz Halperin After working for many years as a volunteer for Bookshare, I became a paid proofreader for the collection about two years ago. I now review books that are scanned and uploaded in formats that can be read using different forms of assistive technology such as text-to-speech, digital Braille or enlarged fonts. Most of the books I work with are books requested by students and titles from the New York Times (NYT) bestsellers list. Last spring, I had a chance to visit “The Mother Ship,” Bookshare’s main office at the Palo Alto, California headquarters of Benetech, Bookshare’s parent nonprofit. While I was there, I discovered how the NYT bestsellers make it into the collection. I used to think that publishers just sent electronic copies to Bookshare. Wrong. While publishers do donate thousands of digital texts to Bookshare, the NYT bestsellers are added to the ...

We have a partnership with the Worth Trust in Chennai, India, to do data entry for Bookshare.org, funded by the Lavelle Fund. I blogged about it in May: Scanning in Tamil Nadu . Our international Bookshare.org manager, Viji Dilip, recently wrote about making a change in what kind of capital equipment to get Worth Trust to help carry out their work: Strange as it may sound I grew up with hearing this often, "Everyone please save all your files now as the current will be going off in the next five minutes." OK, there were no computers when I was growing up in India but the current going "off" was very common. Sometimes for an hour or two and in summer for several hours at a stretch when the Electricity Board scheduled power cuts for every city . These power cuts could last from anywhere from an hour to three hours in the afternoon depending on when the supervisor at the EB came back from lunch. "There was no current" was our equivalent of "The dog a...