Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 20, 2010

We take their files and convert them to the DAISY format which is a digital format designed specifically to create accessible materials for people with print disabilities. We're excited about this trend and the opportunities it creates for the commercial availability of mass market accessible books. Why is this a big deal?

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

APRIL 20, 2013

And when the idea of a peer-to-peer ebook library came to me, it was George who I went to with the idea. After talking me out of calling it Bookster, he explained how the DAISY format would be ideal for our new Bookshare project, that he had made sure that it would work well for ebooks like the ones we were hoping to provide.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 8, 2013

Last week, the National Federation of the Blind and 22 organizations serving people with disabilities filed detailed objections to a petition from a group of makers of e-reader devices led by Amazon to be exempted from accessibility requirements under the relatively new Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act.

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Candid

JUNE 26, 2024

Summer is a great time to explore Candid’s collection of free eBooks and audiobooks for titles that can help you achieve your goals as a nonprofit professional. Here are nine free eBooks to check out for inspiration. Browse our collection of free eBooks and audiobooks on nonprofit leadership, fundraising, and related topics.

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eBook Skills Free Build 105

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MAY 15, 2012

Poet supports image descriptions for electronic books created in the international DAISY standard for digital talking books and will be compatible with descriptions for ebooks in the EPUB3 format. DIAGRAM stands for Digital Image and Graphics Resources for Accessible Materials.

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Candid

NOVEMBER 4, 2024

Here are seven titles from Candid’s free collection of eBooks and audiobooks that offer guidance on how to make a difference through volunteering, career choices, and intentional daily actions. To get started, see How can I access Candid’s eBook collection? Looking to get involved with a nonprofit?

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JULY 28, 2014

Gerardo’s contributions related to the Benetech Global Literacy Program include: Overseeing the building of the tech infrastructure that has taken Bookshare from serving tens of thousands of members to over 300,000 members, with a rapidly growing collection of 280,000+ accessible ebooks.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 10, 2009

But, it's a dream that the commercial ebook vendors keep dashing. And that is setting back the cause of people with disabilities who need that kind of access. We have an action by Amazon that sets back years of work to make ebooks accessible. A recent example of this was web site accessibility. Roy Blount Jr.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 13, 2009

I think it’s time to write a series of short essays on the struggle for accessible books, starting with this brouhaha. In it, we pointed out the irony that the first generation of ebook readers being inaccessible to blind people. Ebooks on PCs have had text-to-speech capabilities for years (although not always enabled).

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 28, 2011

We provide accessible ebooks that can be spoken aloud, turned into Braille or large print. Ironically, many of these users might buy commercial ebooks, but the anti-piracy technology built into many ebook systems are not compatible with the technology these users employ to get the books in Braille or synthetic speech.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 15, 2009

Brief Comments on Accessibility Concerns on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) The disability community should be concerned about ACTA for two reasons: At its core it’s an anti-piracy agreement. The digital measures designed to defeat piracy usually end up equating accessibility with piracy.

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Eric Jacobsen Blog

DECEMBER 13, 2014

You can also download his new, and free, eBook , Trusted Leadership Advisor , when you subscribe for free to his website. This week, Nathan kindly shared more about his eBook and leadership in general. What inspired you to write the ebook? Who is your target reader for the ebook? Do you have another ebook in the works?

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 7, 2012

People with print disabilities around the world have a right to high-quality ebooks that they can read with assistive technology. Benetech’s Bookshare library continues to expand its international service providing accessible books and publications to members in more than 30 countries.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 27, 2014

“They get frustrated and don’t want to read,” she says, “but access to digital books and reading technologies changed all that for Zach.” With Bookshare’s accessible ebooks and reading tools, Zach made a successful transition to college. I don’t wait for my books for new classes; I search the library and find them myself.”

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 22, 2013

Why Circumvention for the Purposes of Access is Crucial A Bookshare Briefing Paper Prepared for the Diplomatic Conference for Visually Impaired Persons The distributors of digital content often use technological protection measures (TPMs) to discourage the making of unauthorized copies.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 10, 2014

It became a burden to his family and caregivers to constantly drop what they were doing to turn a page, so he began seeking out ebooks. This reality changed when Frank found out about Benetech’s Bookshare accessible digital library for people with print disabilities. To continue this work, we depend on the support of generous donors.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 16, 2011

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). We are also building a content model for making images more accessible.

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The Verge

JULY 28, 2021

For customers affected by the shutdown, Amazon is offering a modest promotional credit (NEWKINDLE50) through August 15th for $50 towards a new Kindle Paperwhite or Kindle Oasis, along with $15 in-store credit for ebooks.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 6, 2011

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.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 29, 2018

Born Accessible: Working with publishers to ensure that any new ebook is accessible to people who read differently - with the goal of one day making Bookshare obsolete. Senate and goes into effect this month. When Benetech began, we didn’t know of any other tech for good social enterprise.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 11, 2013

Creating the World’s Largest Collection of Accessible Arabic eBooks Access to knowledge is the critical first step on the path to economic, educational, and social development. In 2011, we began collaborating with the Mada Center (Qatar Assistive Technology Center) to create accessible Arabic-language digital books.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 27, 2012

The first issue is that the treaty would not permit direct access by consumers to international authorized entities. Everyone who is not disabled globally can directly access Amazon.com and order books. Being silent on the big issue of circumvention would lead to a world where accessibility could be prohibited by contract.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 12, 2014

I’m thrilled to share with you some of the recent amazing impact of Bookshare , a Benetech Global Literacy initiative and the largest accessible online library of copyrighted content for people with print disabilities. a11y accessibility Bookshare Braille DAISY ebooks Global Literacy print disabilities Reading'

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Nonprofit Tech for Good

MARCH 27, 2019

Humble Bundle is an online store that sells games, ebooks, and software. It’s highly likely that nonprofits using Facebook Fundraising Tools will get first access to the new Instagram Donation Stickers. To get access to the tools, your nonprofit must have a Google for Nonprofits account. Humble Bundle :: humblebundle.com.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

NOVEMBER 21, 2012

The DDD student staff people work half days at DDD, proofing textbooks to make them accessible to students with print disabilities. Our partners proofread the text, fixing mistakes and adding accessibility, and ship us the files back to add to our Bookshare library. We scan the books in the U.S.,

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 7, 2013

While we’re extremely proud of our achievements in the field of accessibility and disability rights, we know that we’ve just scratched the surface of what we could possibly do to bolster parity of access to information by people with disabilities. We’re making securing new funding for Bookshare’s international expansion a top priority!

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

DECEMBER 3, 2011

One of these sub-themes is “Accessibility: removing barriers and promoting disability-inclusive development.” Of course, accessibility is right up Benetech’s alley and the focus of our Literacy program. Thousands of ebooks pour into the library from over 168 publishers and textbook requests are fulfilled every month.

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Nonprofit Tech for Good

DECEMBER 23, 2023

Along with access to the latest version, ChatGPT 4 Turbo, which is the most intelligent model available at the time of writing, it also provides access to an array of additional tools. To get started, download NFPs.AI’s Introduction to AI for Nonprofits eBook. The ChatGPT Plus Plan offers immense value.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 23, 2014

Technology currently serves privileged groups through tools that provide access to education, literacy, health, and justice. With Bookshare, our student members can access and read the books they need—in the classroom, at home, and on the go—and have a fair opportunity to succeed at school just like their peers without disabilities.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 19, 2017

I have good news: For $5 million a year, we can build a global library that provides tens of millions of people around the world who are blind, low vision, or dyslexic free access to books that will work for them. We have the ebooks. We have hundreds of thousands of ebooks in a dozen languages already available globally.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 7, 2013

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. Ultimately, this community should have equal access to all of the books that are needed for education, employment and social inclusion.

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Copyright Law Library United States 158

Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 18, 2019

The nonprofit Benetech team built the revolutionary Bookshare library for this community, all online, and based on the powerfully flexible ebook. You can take an ebook, push a button and make it Braille. This results in an ebook, which can be shared by Bookshare legally with many thousands of other disabled readers.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JANUARY 17, 2014

Bookshare: Solving the “Accessible Book Famine” Twelve years ago, we had an idea for recreating the traditional library for people with print disabilities—such as those who are blind, cannot physically turn the pages of a book, or have learning disabilities, like dyslexia—using the then-emerging technologies of digital books and crowdsourcing.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 15, 2012

By partnering with all these stakeholders, we reinvented the traditional library for people with print disabilities and brought modern ebook technology to this underserved community. We blew up the old approaches to converting inaccessible books into accessible equivalents.

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Nonprofit Tech for Good

MAY 22, 2020

Including the link for your livestream or video(s) in an Event Page makes it easy for donors to find and watch after your live event and remains easy to access for days, weeks, months to come without getting lost in the social media algorithm. Wondering what to say and do during your virtual fundraising event?

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

FEBRUARY 4, 2013

Bookshare and our other Access to Literacy initiatives, including the DIAGRAM Center and Route 66 Literacy, all made big strides this year through the significant dedication of the community that makes it all happen. After all, in the world of eBooks, ten years is pretty old! Thanks again! We’ve added over 1800 books since then.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 10, 2014

However, she soon encountered the frustrating “accessible book famine” because very few books available were available in Braille. This reality changed when both Kevin and Sophia learned about the accessible online library Bookshare , an initiative of Silicon Valley technology nonprofit Benetech. Data is now a core resource.

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