Across the U.S., thousands of students with print disabilities will start their school year without the textbooks they need for class. These students need their books converted to accessible formats. To meet that need, the Benetech Volunteer Program is launching a new project for the 2014-15 school year, Team-Up for Textbooks, to recruit volunteer teams to proofread student requested textbooks—and we’re inviting you to join us!
One year ago, on June 28, 2013, at a diplomatic conference in Marrakesh, Morocco, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) agreed on a historic international copyright exception for people with print disabilities, known as the Marrakesh Treaty. We certainly have plenty to celebrate on the first anniversary of the signing of the Treaty, but the road towards equal accessibility for all is still long and there is much that remains to be done. Access to written materials and education is not a privilege, but a basic human right—fundamental to personal, economic, and social development. I hope you join us as we advance this global right and work towards making the Marrakesh Treaty as successful as possible, so that it can empower people with print disabilities—particularly those in developing countries—live fuller lives based on equal access to knowledge.
Benetech has announced that Bookshare, the largest accessible online library for people with print disabilities, is expanding its services in Canada. Thanks to its partnership with Canada’s newly launched Centre for Equitable Library Access (CELA), Bookshare now offers its large and growing collection of accessible ebooks to Canadians with print disabilities in their own communities through their public libraries.
At Benetech, we believe that as accessible digital content and applications increasingly become more available, they must also be easily discoverable. That’s exactly what we set out to do through the Accessibility Metadata Project, one of our Benetech Labs projects. We have recently completed the project and I’m delighted to say that we accomplished all these goals and more!
Today, May 15 is Global Accessibility Awareness Day—a day intended to get people talking, thinking, and learning about digital accessibility for people with disabilities. This is an opportunity to share what Benetech’s DIAGRAM Center is doing to ensure that digital content is accessible to all. The DIAGRAM Center is working at the frontier of accessible publishing and online content by making it easier, faster, and cheaper to create and use accessible digital images. One of the many emerging technologies we are researching is 3D printing for accessible educational materials.
