Benetech is proud to join the international community and our partners in observance of International Day of Persons with Disabilities to promote awareness and mobilize support for the inclusion of persons with disabilities in society and development. This year’s theme, “Inclusion Matters,” focuses on access and empowerment for people with disabilities. As a nonprofit whose […]
Thank you to our thriving Bookshare community for everything you have done to to enable us to accomplish together tremendous achievements over the past year. As we look forward to 2015, we know that much work remains to be done. This giving season, you may be receiving communications from our team with an appeal for financially supporting Bookshare. Please take a look and give whatever you can to allow us to continue these efforts and do even more, for more people. Thank you in advance for your support.
There were many over-the-top cultural experiences I took in on my recent visit to the U.A.E., where I headed this past November to represent Bookshare at the 32nd Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF). As Director of Content Acquisition for Benetech’s Global Literacy Program, which operates Bookshare, my key role is to engage with publishers in a deep conversation about the power of digital books to improve the lives of people at a reading disadvantage both here in the U.S. and around the world.
Press Release: What has been commonly referred to as the “Treaty for the Blind” was formally adopted yesterday, and signed by 51 countries today, in a Diplomatic Conference convened by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). This historic treaty paves the way to expanding the access to books for people who are blind or otherwise print disabled and provides the necessary legal framework for organizations, like Benetech and its Bookshare initiative, to deliver those books to people across international borders.
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.
