For people who cannot use standard print, the increasing availability of digital books and services such as Benetech’s Bookshare library are a boon that is unlocking the world of reading, says The New York Times. In a story titled “An App to Aid the Visually Impaired,” author Jonah Bromwich highlights Bookshare as a “notable advantage” […]
At the heart of Silicon Valley—where the focus is all about things like enterprise hardware and software, consumer apps, digital advertising, and monetization of data, gaming, and entertainment—Benetech is an outlier, argues Mozilla’s new online magazine The Open Standard in an interview with CEO Jim Fruchterman and VP of Global Literacy Betsy Beaumon. In a story titled “Open Source for the Global Good, From Silicon Valley,” author Caleb Garling sits down with Fruchterman and Beaumon to talk about Benetech’s model of “coding for global change” with open source solutions.
Wired Magazine has quoted our CEO, Jim Fruchterman, in an about the negotiations for an international treaty to make books more accessible to people who are blind or have other print disabilities. Entitled “Obama Stops Championing Treaty That Gives the Blind Better Access to E-Books,” the article, written by David Kravets, outlines how lobbying by Hollywood and dozens of the world’s largest corporations may subvert the treaty, which has been years in the making.
Michael Yudin, Acting Assistant Secretary for the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) at the U.S. Department of Education, published a blog post entitled “Technology Gives Students with Disabilities Access to College Courses” about his recent visit to Mission Middle College in Santa Clara, California. During the visit, Mr. Yudin met with a group of Bookshare student members and observed a demonstration of how people use Bookshare.
Publishing Perspectives, the prestigious online journal of international publishing news and opinion, featured Benetech’s Bookshare library in a recent story called “Exploring Accessible Publishing for the Print Disabled.” The story also notes that Benetech shepherds forth “a mammoth five year R&D undertaking called DIAGRAM, which aims to educate publishers about how to make content fully accessible for everyone from the very beginning of the process,” and mentions Poet, a web-based, open source image description tool developed by DIAGRAM.
