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In the United States, there are all too many students like Kevin, who are denied equal opportunity to engage in the same curriculum as their peers without disabilities. In 2004, the United States passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act , requiring schools to provide special education services to eligible students.
This has created the ironic situation where blind people, who because of their disability require access to digital copies, have been effectively locked out of purchasing ebooks for the last decade. The digital content is presented as text, but the built-in read-aloud capability is disabled because of ambiguity over audio rights.
Today I’m delighted to share the exciting news about the new award we just received from OSEP to build upon Bookshare’s success and significantly improve access for students with disabilities. Thousands of ebooks pour into the library from over 168 publishers and textbook requests are fulfilled every month. In the U.S.,
Thousands of ebooks are pouring into the collection each month thanks to the dedication of our volunteers around the world and partnerships with more than 500 socially responsible publishers who donate their digital files. These milestones represent a giant leap forward in the number of students and individuals we serve.
Frankly, it didn’t go as well as we had hoped, and Lavelle worked with us to retarget the grant to focus on students with visual impairments. This experience helped us prove the potential of Bookshare to meet the needs of students with disabilities. Even in the United States, this was true of probably a quarter of our student users.
The application allows any user to send information—including photos, videos, audio, or text—simply and securely to a Martus account. 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.
This is why the making of accessible books is a classic example of market failure: if publishers could make a lot of money selling braille, large print, audio, and fully accessible textbooks, we wouldn’t need a copyright exception. It’s expensive to adapt textbooks to be accessible. That’s so 20th Century (or 19th?)!
Learni is a fledgling education technology company that aims to create better learning ebooks, enabling users to navigate, search, mark and annotate them. Words that are ‘one-layered’ in actual books can be automatically linked to other sources for information (translation, Wikipedia, audio, search etc.).
Libraries for people who are blind or dyslexic are the primary source of accessible books in audio, large print or braille. The Bookshare promise to American students with disabilities is that if they need a book for education, Bookshare will ensure that they have it. Bookshare was created under the Section 121 U.S.
In what is known as the “ braille provision ,” the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 2004 mandates that the teams who help write educational plans for students with disabilities presume that all blind and visually impaired children should be taught Braille unless it is determined to be inappropriate. Accordingly, U.S.
After all, in the world of eBooks, ten years is pretty old! What began as a small online library, with a collection built in large part by its users, is now the primary national supplier of electronic accessible educational materials for students with print disabilities. Thanks again!
The miracle of ebooks What if we had the ability to overcome these accessibility barriers, barriers that affect most of humanity, not just people with identified disabilities, wouldn’t we have the moral obligation to act? We can use the same ebook file to deliver the content ten different ways. We can do better!
She runs a for-profit social enterprise named Daproim that provides data entry services using disadvantaged students as their primary workforce. Bookshare is our large digital library for students with disabilities such as blindness or dyslexia. Daproim has more than 7600 applications from Kenyan students who want to work there.
Before Benetech was founded, blind people were read to either in person by a family member, volunteer, or paid reader, or via audio cassette tape. The first was the ebook. Fundamentally, the Arkenstone Reader allowed blind people to create their own personal ebook as a text file that could be read in something like Microsoft Word.
Colleen Fahey’s article, How Audio Enhances Your Brand Content: Find Your Signature Sound , provides guidance for how your nonprofit can strengthen its voice. John Haydon is offering up [FOR FREE] 42 pages of eBook goodness to help you get more traffic, increase search rankings and boost conversions. You should.
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