A Different Kind of Hackathon: Making the Web Inclusive to All

Benetech’s DIAGRAM Center and PEAT host a hackathon to create accessible user experiences On May 15-16, the DIAGRAM Center, a Benetech Global Literacy Initiative, and the Partnership on Employment & Accessible Technology (PEAT) co-hosted a hackathon at the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired in San Francisco. Sponsored by Microsoft, the two-day event took […]

Benetech’s Code Alliance Connects Communities for Social Impact

About a year ago, I joined the Benetech Labs’ team to learn more about the role technology plays in improving people’s lives. Benetech has been actively working in this space since 1989, when Jim Fruchterman first founded the organization. Jim’s goal was to improve machine reading and recognition systems and build software for people that […]

Benetech’s Code Alliance Connects Nonprofits and Volunteers at CHI4GOOD’s Day of Service

Members of Benetech’s Code Alliance team recently organized the first ever CHI4GOOD Day of Service at the annual conference hosted by the Human-Computer Interaction Special Interest Group of the Association for Computing Machinery in San Jose, California. Code Alliance is a Benetech initiative that connects technology professionals to volunteer opportunities with open source software projects for social […]

Benetech Team Hacks for Good

Members of our Engineering/ Product/ Project Management / Design teams recently participated in a hack day, where they came up with some valuable proof of concepts for our Human Rights and Global Literacy initiatives and experimented with microcontrollers. Granted, hack days are no panacea for solving the world’s problems. Did we complete the proof of concepts we worked on? Of course not. But did we make great progress on various fronts and are we using what we learned to design our way forward? YES!