Volunteering for Social Change

Did you know that April is National Volunteer Month? We’d like to take this opportunity to recognize and thank Benetech’s fantastic community of dedicated volunteers who amplify the positive impact we make in the lives of our beneficiaries. In this post, we’ll highlight the wonderful contributions of our student volunteers from Brigham Young University, who regularly meet to describe Bookshare textbook images, as well as the impact created through our SocialCoding4Good initiative that operates at the hub of technology-for-good volunteer engagement.

On the Future of Braille: Thoughts by Radical Braille Advocates

This piece originally appeared as a guest post on Jim Fruchterman’s Blog. I recently had the honor to speak at the first-ever Braille Summit, hosted on June 19-21, 2013 by the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS) and Perkins School for the Blind. With the goal of promoting braille literacy, this […]

Publishing Perspectives Features Bookshare and DIAGRAM

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.

Benetech Releases Image Description Tool to Improve Accessibility of Graphical Content for Students with Print Disabilities

Poet Open Source Web Application Allows Crowdsourcing of Image Descriptions in Accessible Books The Benetech DIAGRAM Center has released an open source web application for creating and editing crowdsourced image descriptions in books used by students with print disabilities. DIAGRAM, which stands for Digital Image and Graphics Resources for Accessible Materials, is working to dramatically change the […]