I’m delighted to share with you today a wonderful success story from our Volunteer Program. UC Santa Cruz students who participated in our volunteer pilot project—proofreading textbooks for our Bookshare collection—have done a fantastic job proofreading over a short period of time three entire textbooks! This means more than 2,300 pages of text and an amazing gift for the 250,000+ Bookshare student members we serve.
The Nominet Trust, a United Kingdom leading social tech funder, included Bookshare, our Global Literacy initiative, on its list of 100 global ventures using digital technology to solve some of the world’s biggest social problems. “It’s a life-changing service” for those with visual impairments or other print disabilities, states the Bookshare listing on the Nominet Trust 100.
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. Earlier this year, we submitted to Schema.org—an initiative supported by the major search engines—our group proposal for accessibility metadata that would make it widely possible to find online content with accessible features. Today we have big news to share: the Schema.org team has just announced it agreed to adopt the accessibility properties we proposed!
Our new Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Commitment to Action is to increase service and expand the number of accessible books for people who are blind in India through Bookshare International, an initiative of our Global Literacy Program. We are embarking on this project with the support of a generous grant from the Lavelle Fund for the Blind. As the General Manager for our Global Literacy Program, I’d like to tell you a bit more about the work this grant will make possible, the lasting impact it allows us to make and why this project advances CGI’s mission of creating and implementing original solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.
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.
