My name is Jordan Gould and I am from Brantford, Ontario, Canada, a town about an hour south of Toronto. I am currently in my second year of Computer Science at The University of Western Ontario. I found the Benetech projects interesting because I am a person with low vision and have in the past used DAISY formatted books on CD with a specialized CD player. Since smartphones and tablets are more ubiquitous now, I believe that contributing to Go Read can help expand access and usability of DAISY books in an academic environment.
I am Yashasvi Girdhar. I am a Junior majoring in Computer Science at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India. I was introduced to Benetech when applying for a Google Summer of Code internship. I was really impressed by Benetech’s cause to support and serve society through the use of technology and am grateful to be given an opportunity to contribute to it.
Bookshare Web Reader allows Bookshare members to directly open and read Bookshare eBooks with a Web browser, without having to download any files or use additional software reading tools. It enables users to adjust font size, colors and display format, and takes advantage of new and exciting features in the Google Chrome browser, which allow users to read books multi-modally, with word-by-word highlighting and text-to-speech. Web Reader saves time and effort…and delivers a great reading experience. All a user has to do is find the book s/he is interested in, select “Read Now” and read it instantly in their browser.
Over the past three months, we’ve had the pleasure of working with three very talented students as a part of Google Summer of Code 2013. This is our second consecutive summer partnering with this amazing global program, which offers student developers stipends to write code for open source software projects. What’s so great about the program is that not only do the students get to work on real world, open source software development with a mentor, but the projects that participate benefit greatly from the new talent, ideas and collaboration. This summer, our students have been working on three pretty cool projects, contributing code that extends the functionality of tools and capabilities we provide as part of our Bookshare initiative.
As accessible materials increasingly become more available, we must ensure that users can easily discover this accessible content. It’s time to elevate the discussion about the importance of the discoverability of accessible materials. Help us make sure our panel is part of SXSW 2014! Go to the SXSW PanelPicker and vote for Discovering Accessible Learning Resources. PanelPicker closes tomorrow, Friday, September 6, so please VOTE NOW.
