Benetech

In the context of the growing availability of information on state surveillance, our commitment to provide the human rights movement with secure tools and capacity building for the documentation of human rights abuses has only increased. We are also convinced that partnerships for the advancement of social justice are key to produce long-lasting change. Today we are proud to join a global coalition in calling upon the international community to assess surveillance laws and activities in light of international human rights obligations.

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.

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.

Today we’d like to introduce you to our second cohort of interns: Javier Guzman and Marcos Rodriguez. They, too, were wonderful additions to the Benetech community. As in the first session of our Internship Program, Javier and Marcos participated in various company meetings, brown bag lunches and other learning opportunities. They were also extremely helpful in assisting Bookshare with daily tasks, including proofreading dozens of student-requested picture books and updating metadata in Spanish, which allowed us to process and add many new titles to our Spanish collection.