Kathy Stratton with her son, Brian
We recently learned about the work of the New Jersey Reading Disabilities Task Force from Kathy Stratton, the mother of a Bookshare member. Appointed by the governor, this 11-member task force is researching the services available to students who struggle with reading to find out if the state is meeting the needs of its students with reading disabilities.
On April 30, the Task Force held a public hearing to gather testimony; over 130 attended and 60 spoke.
In Kathy’s words, “The theme was clear and consistent – schools are not meeting the needs of students who struggle with reading. Parent after parent spoke with passion about the time, and emotional, educational, and financial toll these struggles have taken on their families. The educators who spoke acknowledged that they and their colleagues are often poorly trained to meet the needs of dyslexic students.”
She urged the commission to consider that “in addition to teaching students to learn to read, it is equally important to provide struggling readers with opportunities to read to learn.”
She emphasized the value of accessible instructional material to enable struggling readers to keep up with their classmates and talked about the Bookshare celebration in DC, at which Senator Harkin (IA-D) said, “100% of Iowa’s school districts have Bookshare memberships.”
Kathy urged the task force to provide information about the importance of accessible books in their report to the Governor and noted that 25% of qualified students in NJ are members in comparison to 100% of districts in IA. In conclusion, she said, “I hope that someday soon I can report to Senator Harkin that 100% of schools in NJ have an organizational membership to Bookshare too.”
Her son, the Bookshare member, intends to contribute written testimony to the Task Force.
The testimony from the hearing will be considered by the task force as it compiles information for a report to the governor of New Jersey in July.
The Bookshare team applauds the Task Force for its efforts, as well as Kathy for her dedication, and looks forward to a positive outcome for all students with print disabilities in New Jersey!
Bookshare Helped Student Transition to College
Zach
Zach Bryant pulled straight A’s in his Maryland high school. He liked to read all kinds of books then, but that wasn’t always the case for Zach. He has Cerebral Palsy (CP) which prohibits him from speaking and walking. To communicate and write his thoughts down, he uses an augmentative communication device (AAC).
Simple tasks, like turning a printed page or finding the last chapter he read was frustrating for him. According to his mom, this experience happens to many children with CP. “They get frustrated and don’t want to read, but access to digital books and reading technologies changed all that for Zach, my son who is very intelligent.”
Now, with his individual membership to Bookshare, an online library introduced to him in high school by his Assistive Technology teacher, Zach applies himself and put his eagerness to learn into action. He attends Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. He still uses his Kurzweil 3000 technology and Bookshare to find textbooks and he still loves to read political and non-fiction books for reading pleasure.
When we caught up with this busy young college student, he said, “Without Bookshare my academic life would have been much harder for me and my caregivers. It’s amazing that I can find most books I want and even postsecondary textbooks. No one has to do all that scanning for me and I don’t have to wait for my books. I can search for them and find them myself.”
The online library of accessible books and periodicals is free for U.S. students who are blind, have low vision, a physical disability, like CP, or a reading disability, like severe dyslexia, that prevents them from reading a standard book in print. The library is funded through awards from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). Today, there are over 150,000 books including many textbooks on all kinds of subjects at many different levels.
According to Mrs.Bryant, “Zach is still very independent. Without Bookshare, he may not have stayed on grade level work to enable him to progress to college. These tools helped him to make the transition.” She credits her son’s love of knowledge and the ability to access digital books and reading technologies that enable him to reach for higher goals. “He’s our brainiac!”
Bookshare Celebrates Its Tenth Anniversary
A guest post from Jim Fruchterman, CEO of Benetech, the parent company for Bookshare
Bookshare, Benetech’s pioneering digital library for people with print disabilities, celebrated its 10th birthday last night with a terrific party that was attended by many of our long-time friends and supporters. The event was hosted by Google on its campus in Mountain View, California, which is home to some of the most cutting edge technologists in the world.
Betsy Beaumon, Benetech VP and General Manager of Bookshare
During the event, our Bookshare staff offered demos of our Bookshare library and our Go Read accessible ebook reader for Android. They also demoed Read2Go, the accessible ebook application for the Apple OS and Route 66 Literacy, Benetech’s online literacy instructional program.
During the party we had a surprise video message from Stevie Wonder, a long-time Bookshare member who told us that he is using Read2Go to read accessible books from the Bookshare library. “I can feel it all over, it’s a hit!” said Stevie. Thanks Stevie! We think so too.
T.V. Raman of Google Research, a long-time Bookshare member and advisor, was on
T.V. Raman and Tilden
hand to help us celebrate last night. T.V. noted that Bookshare pioneered the delivery of low cost, accessible books for people with disabilities, and he looked forward to Bookshare’s 20th anniversary party when we would be demoing the next generation of this technology. Bookshare was one of the early recipients of a Google Grant of online advertising, which continues to this day. This summer, we will have three students working on Bookshare software for our users underwritten by Google’s Summer of Code program.
Bookshare has always attracted people who want to revolutionize how printed material is made available to people with disabilities who cannot read traditional books. Our vision is to provide equal opportunities for students with disabilities and help them overcome a major barrier to accessing to the most valuable prize in society: a great education.
Visionary funders who have supported this radical idea from the start attended our party last night including members of our board. Board members Gerry Davis, Jim Kleckner, Leighton Read, Brian Behlendorf, Christy Chin and Rob Wexler have provided wise counsel that has steered Bookshare’ success.
During our party, we also honored Social Profit Network’s Robert Levenson, the Skoll Foundation and the Omidyar Foundation which provided vital philanthropic funding to expand Bookshare over the last decade. In addition, we acknowledged the critical support of Bernie Newcomb who helped fund our International Bookshare service. Bernie was represented last night by Marie Young of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. During the party, we were delighted to receive a commendation from
Jim Fruchterman and Marcia Adler
Marcia Adler who attended the party on behalf of Liz Kniss, who represents District 5 on the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors. Liz has been a long-time Bookshare supporter, and we were honored by the acknowledgement.
Bookshare Exceeds All Expectations
The idea for Bookshare came to me when my then-teenaged-son Jimmy, who also attended last night’s party, brought home Napster. Jimmy had discovered Napster at the home my neighbor, Eileen Richardson, who was then the acting CEO of Napster. Napster made me think of how peer-to-peer information sharing could help people with disabilities. I figured that if one Bookshare user thought a book was worth scanning, then that book was worth sharing with people around the U.S. who also had print disabilities.
When Bookshare was first created, most people with print disabilities read printed
Kristina Pappas and Rob Turner from Bookshare
material via books on tape delivered through the mail, which was expensive and slow. Our breakthrough with Bookshare was to put our users in charge of the collection. Instead of us deciding what people with disabilities should read, we let our readers decide which books should be scanned and shared under an exception in the U.S. copyright law. Our lower cost model made it practical to invert the power structure. As a result, we quickly became the largest online library for people with print disabilities.
Bookshare has grown tremendously from the 3,000 students that we were serving in 2007. A little over 4 years ago, we won a competitive contract award from the US Department of Education which took a bold risk on Bookshare. With this support, we began reaching out to students, teachers and schools throughout the U.S., and that risk paid off. By this September, we will be serving over 200,000 students with print disabilities in the US, twice the number that we promised the Department of Education we would reach by this date. By September, we’ll also have added more than 100k educational titles and achieved more than 3 million total downloads, delivering books for less than one tenth of the cost of traditional approaches.
Each month, we add more than 2,000 new books to the Bookshare collection and more than three quarters of those books come from socially responsible publishers who want to make their work available to all readers. The first publisher to donate books to Bookshare, years ahead of their peers, was O’Reilly Media. Bookshare also works with large trade publishers such as HarperCollins, Random House, Scholastic, international publishers like the IMF, World Bank and Brookings, twenty-two university presses, and more than one hundred and fifty other publishers. These publishers eliminate the laborious steps of scanning and proofreading digital text by giving us permission to share the text with readers with disabilities. They send Bookshare the same digital book files that they provide to Amazon, Apple or Barnes and Noble.
It was great to be able to celebrate with the Bookshare team, and the users who created this tremendous library, with the help of Google, our many friends in the area, and Stevie Wonder!
Students to Contribute to Development of Go Read
Every summer, Google sponsors “Google Summer of Code” (GSoC) which offers stipends to postsecondary student developers and pairs them with open source mentoring organizations. Given Google’s high engineering standards, selection as a mentoring organization is a great honor!
This year, Benetech was awarded three, top-notch students and is asking them to work on Go Read development projects. Go Read is a free, open source, accessible e-book reader for Android phones and tablets. Currently optimized for visually-impaired readers (and usable by anyone), Go Read allows readers to enjoy Bookshare books whenever and wherever they want.
Student developers will work on:
- Word-level highlighting synchronized with free and open source text-to-speech voices
- Accessing Bookshare periodicals and sharing books of interest on Facebook
- Integration of MathML
These projects will expand the capabilities of Go Read to support additional math content and periodicals, and to support readers with dyslexia.
Students gain valuable software development experience and opportunities for future employment from the summer.
Thank you, Google, for your interest in Benetech and support of students to help with our Android ebook reader!
Over the weekend of April 21 and 22, two engineers from the Bookshare team, Gerardo Capiel and Rom Srinivasan, participated in the International Space Apps Challenge, a two-day event designed to bring citizens from around the world together to solve challenges relevant to spatial exploration and social need. It’s a “code-a-thon” weekend – a technology development marathon – with engineers on all seven continents and in space volunteering their time, collaborating on solutions to interesting problems.
Watch video of Rom and Gerardo at the Challenge
The Bookshare team contributed one of the challenges for the weekend: to continue development of MathTrax, an open source graphing application developed by NASA that plots equations, physics simulations or data files. As demonstrated in a video by Stanford student Nicole Torcolini, MathTrax is particularly helpful for students with disabilities because the graphs have descriptions and sound.
However, MathTrax has limitations. NASA hasn’t had the resources to continue to develop it, so it’s not current with HTML5 and cannot be embedded into EPUB 3, the current publishing standard for digital textbooks. Various engineers signed up to work on the challenges of MathTrax – their work will further the accessibility of graphs for individuals with visual impairments. Over the weekend, the team worked on:
- Automatically leveraging the descriptions that MathTrax creates and putting them in a browser–based environment, so readers can listen to them with a screen reader or potentially text-to-speech applications, instead of just in the MathTrax environment
- Taking the graphing capacity and images that weren’t easy to print on a tactile printer, and generating the images in a format (SVG) that will print on tactile printer. The team also started work on another format that would enable printing the images on very inexpensive 3D printer
- Lastly, the team worked on technology that would embed the MathTrax capability in ebooks, so readers could hear MathTrax’s auditory representation of the data even when user didn’t have an internet connection.
The technical descriptions of the Benetech challenges are on online; and the engineers described their work over the weekend in a video.
Around the world, 2,083 participated, working on 71 challenges and developing more than 100 unique solutions. After the weekend, Rom commented, “It was very inspiring to see people from all over the country come to San Francisco on their own dime to help contribute to solving some of the problems of the less fortunate around the world.” If you are interested in learning more about the results of the weekend, please visit the International Spaces Apps Challenge site.
Can We Give Too Much?
A guest post from Lucy Greco, a blind advocate for accessible technology. An Assistive Technology Specialist at UC Berkeley, San
Lucy Greco
Francisco Bay Area, Greco is the user of various assistive technologies since the early 1980s. She is passionate about the ways technology makes the world more accessible to everyone but especially to individuals with disabilities.
“For students with disabilities in college and universities, where do we draw the line between providing them support services and teaching them to be independent,” asks Lucy Greco.
I graduated from California State University Hayward in 1997. The ADA was only six years old and assistive technologies were nowhere near as extensive and capable as they are today.
Graduating from university seemed to be an extremely elusive target at the time. Every semester I was only able to take three classes. Two or three times I enrolled in a fourth but was never able to complete all four. I was an extraordinarily independent student according to the staff at the disabled students’ programs at the various schools I attended. When I consider the services offered to students today from various universities, I realize that if I had those types of services while in university, I could have finished much faster and possibly even gone on to earn a second or third degree.
Disabled students in postsecondary education in the United States have fantastic opportunities that nobody would have imagined 20 years ago. Their basic rights are protected by law. Almost every private and public school has staffing to support students with disabilities throughout their education. Some schools have additional resources to support students even beyond legally mandated services.
Student with reading disabilities are guaranteed access to their texts in a format tailored to their requirements. Students with mobility impairments are guaranteed access to classrooms and other school facilities that they need to use. Students with cognitive disabilities can receive accommodations that will allow them to complete their education.
I am proud to work at an institution that has always embraced its students with disabilities and helped them achieve what they want. The institution I work for receives additional funding from the Department of Education to provide non-mandated services for our students. I would argue that many of the services provided by this funding should be mandated by law. Although they are currently not, I appreciate our ability to provide these services.
Colleges provide the opportunity for young students to make the transition from childhood to adulthood. Many incoming freshman are shocked and overwhelmed by the level of independence demanded in college. By graduation, most college students have not only adjusted to the independence and freedom but have become independent adults. However, students with disabilities are at a higher risk of not achieving the same independence as their peers.
Students with disabilities can become as dependent upon a disability services
Disabled student services are there to guarantee the students access. In my opinion, sometimes these programs may cause students to miss out on some of life's valuable lessons.
program as they were on their parents and the support network they had through grade school. Disabled students programs help their students negotiate their accommodations, such as accessing course materials or facilities.
My philosophy when working with my students is that students should be served as efficiently as possible, with support that is effective. But the students should be deeply involved in every step of the process. This is known as the interactive accommodation process.
The interactive process fails when students are not given the ability to contribute as much as they can to the process. For example, if a disabled student services office automatically distributes accommodation letters to faculty, students can very easily avoid communicating their needs directly. I’m not saying that students’ instructors should not be automatically informed with an accommodation letter, but that disabled students also have the responsibility to work with their instructors to see that their needs are met. Communicating effectively with faculty will help with communication in other life situations. A student who has never had to explain what accommodations they need may not even know how to clearly describe those needs.
For example, if an accommodation letter states that a student needs a room alone, I believe that the student should be responsible for working out the exact specifics with the instructor. At some point well in advance of the time when the need must be met, the student should sit down with the instructor and explain what “a room alone” means. Can the room alone be in an office? Can it have a ringing phone? Can it have a window?
Students receiving their course materials in a specialized format should also be highly involved in the process. While documentation describes accommodations, the disability service provider needs to directly engage with the student to be sure of how that accommodation is realized.
A student with a learning disability that affects their reading may benefit from one of several assistive technologies. Only by closely working with the student to try a variety of products can the best fit be found. For example, does the student need to hear the text, do pictures distract from the content, how should mathematical formulas be represented, among other questions.
Students should also learn how to create their own alternative media. They should be provided the opportunity to experiment with the alternative media tools to create the material. If someone has always scanned your books for you, then after you graduate, how will you perform this basic task? The most valuable skill I learned as a student was to create my own electronic texts from hard copies. I admit, I prefer using a human reader for most of my work because I find it quicker and better for me. But knowing how to scan something quickly when no one else is around to read it to me is a skill I wouldn’t give up for the world.
Some schools allow students use of assistive technology that the school owns. UC Berkeley helps students find what’s best and then acquire their own. I offer assistance to any student I work with in acquiring their personal assistive technology. Students then have the opportunity to use and learn as much about the technology that they can. They are also able to apply what they used in college to their professional and personal lives.
Sadly many students are not offered these opportunities. And others who are offered these opportunities do not take advantage of them. These are the students who become dependent upon the system to provide them with their accommodations.
By learning how to communicate personally and specifically so that their individual needs may be met, and by mastering the wide range of accommodating technologies, students are better able to work and live independently. This independence creates a more fulfilling life for students and allows them greater confidence and freedom in meeting their own needs and contributing both to their own well-being and that of the entire community.
The content of this post is the opinion of the guest author and does not in any way reflect the opinion of the Bookshare team. Comments from other university DSS staff are welcome!
Assistive Technology Spotlight – Texthelp Apps
We are happy to feature innovative new assistive technologies in this blog. Today, we want to tell you about a Web App from Texthelp, eBook Reader, that reads Bookshare books in the Cloud. eBook Reader is one of a new suite of Web Apps that work within browsers on iPad, iPod Touch, iPhone, and other mobile devices as well as PCs and Macs. A short video shows how the eBook Reader works. Current Apps include: Read&Write Web, eBook Reader for Bookshare® eBooks, Speech, and Dictionary.
Students in schools and colleges who use Read&Write GOLD can use these Apps at school and at home. They’ll find familiar features, including Read Aloud with dual color highlighting, Dictionary, Translator, and Study Skills, anywhere, anytime.
One early user seems very enthusiastic: “I am beyond thrilled with the new Web Apps from Texthelp! These Apps provide students with full access to curriculum materials on revolutionary mobile devices. Our students will now be able to use the Apps directly on their iPads, in the classroom or media center, sitting in the beanbag chairs or wherever they want. They will not have to go sit at a big computer and look “different” than the other kids. The best part is that there are books on there that the kids want to read. It’s not just the classroom novel or textbook and that has made a huge difference for their independent reading books.
I worked with one student who was a non-reader and would not use a computer or netbook. We put the class reading book on an iPad using the eBook Reader and he loves it. If only you knew this student, because getting him to like anything is so hard. This was like a miracle for us!” states Ashley Tremblay, AT Specialist, CES, Trumbull, CT.
The excitement was shared by another educator, Denise Falcon, a Learning Specialist at The Lillian and Betty Ratner School in Ohio, “Being able to access Bookshare through eBook Reader finally adds the missing pieces that struggling readers need! The highlighting tools and built-in dictionaries give students the tools to finally be able to annotate eBooks and find definitions of unknown words without ever leaving the content.”
The eBook Reader uses Bookshare’s API, (application programming interface), that automates and takes care of many Bookshare functions. Betsy Beaumon, Vice President and General Manager of the Literacy Program at Benetech said, “We congratulate Texthelp on their new eBook Reader, seamlessly connecting access to educational content at school and home. This use of our API has broken down another barrier to access, making accessible instructional materials (AIM) very easy to use, available anytime, anywhere.”
Here’s a little more information about the Web Apps
- Read&Write Web – The Read&Write Web toolbar opens within a browser and interacts with web content providing: Text-to-Speech to read html content aloud with dual color highlighting, Dictionary and Picture Dictionary to look up unfamiliar words, Translator to translate selected words into multiple languages, Study Skills to highlight and extract important pieces of information, and Fact Finder to research on the web. Users can also control the speed of the reading voice.
- eBook Reader – The innovative eBook Reader for Bookshare eBooks allows a user to log in to Bookshare, search for, open or save a Bookshare eBook, and read the book aloud with dual color highlighting. eBook Reader also provides access to the same support tools found in Read&Write Web as well as personalization options for reading and speech.
- Speech – Designed for smaller mobile devices such as phones, Speech allows users to read aloud any typed or pasted text with color highlighting.
- Dictionary – Another App meant for smaller devices, Dictionary allows users to look up typed or pasted words and get text definitions as well as image representations. Definitions can also be read aloud.
On March 8, 2012, ninety guests gathered at the U.S. Capitol to hear Senator Tom Harkin (IA- D), Chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Appropriations Committee, recognize the good work of the staff and volunteers of Bookshare on its 10th anniversary.
The Iowa Senator and Julie Freed, an assistive technology teacher and constituent of the Senator’s home state, thanked Bookshare for breaking down barriers to reading access for individuals with print disabilities.
Senator Tom Harkin (middle) with Tom Sheridan and Julie Freed (left), Jim Fruchterman and Betsy Beaumon (right)
In his speech, Senator Harkin first acknowledged the leadership of Jim Fruchterman, Benetech’s CEO and the founder of Bookshare along with Betsy Beaumon, V.P. and General Manager of Bookshare’s Literacy Programs. He said, “Special thanks to Jim Fruchterman. Talk about a visionary! I can’t tell you what marvelous things Jim has done, especially with Bookshare!”
Ms. Freed honored Senator Harkin’s work in Congress to uphold the promise of ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act, 1990) and IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, reauthorized in 2004). These pieces of legislation are signature achievements authored by the Senator to support more than 50 million Americans. The educator also spoke about Iowa’s commitment to equal access and that 100% of Iowa school districts use Bookshare to support students who are blind or have low vision, a reading disability such as dyslexia, or a physical disability like cerebral palsy that impedes them from holding a printed book or turning a page with ease.
Senator Harkin discussed the benefits of digital accessible books and reading technologies to improve education, social engagement, community participation and employment for individuals, especially students. Bookshare now serves more than 190,000 members — 95% of whom are U.S. students.
“If we are really serious about providing a quality education for all students,” said the Senator, “and that we won’t leave any student behind, then we have to ensure that all students, including those with visual impairments and other disabilities, have ready access to information, knowledge and books. In the past and still in schools today, students depend on readers; others have to wait months to get their reading materials converted to braille or audio format, and some go without. Students with visual impairments, brain injuries, severe physical impairments and learning disabilities often need alternative access to text, journals, newspapers and specialty publications. As Julie said, ‘access to digital books has been limited by time and the number of books available.’”
Senator Harkin continued, “Access to digital books has also been limited by publishers’ concerns about copyright laws. The truly remarkable thing about Bookshare is it really has broken down these barriers:
• The barriers of diversity of resources. Only 5% of books were available for students with print disabilities prior to digital content.
• The barriers of access. Some books were available in braille, some in audio and some in digital text…Few books were available in all these formats, and some were not available at all.
• The barrier of time. Alternative formats can take 4 weeks or 4 months to receive. A student who needed a book to study may find that their class is nearly over by the time they get it.
“With digital formats, these barriers have been removed. Alternative formats allow students to succeed in reading the exact same text as their peers at the same time and to read the same books for pleasure. Students can access newspapers to stay up-to-date on current events and not only be a part of their community but participate as a full member. Most importantly, digital access allows students to take advanced courses in high school and to graduate.”
The Senator acknowledged U.S. government officials who attended the Bookshare event including Alexa Posny, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education and Rehabilitation Services (OSERS), Kathleen Martinez, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor and Sue Swenson, Deputy Assistant Secretary of OSERS.
Other honored guests included Glinda Hill and other representatives from the U.S. Department of Education; representatives from the U.S. Department of State; Eve Hill, Professor and Senior Counselor to the Attorney General who recently testified to members of Congress on “The Promise of Accessible Technologies – Challenges and Opportunities;” Bookshare’s national advisory board including two student ambassadors; educators from Fairfax, VA, Washington D.C. and Montgomery County, Maryland, and leaders from the disability and publishing communities.
Senator Harkin also told a story about Megan Krapfl, a 9th grader in Williamsburg, Iowa. Megan is a member of Bookshare and uses the online digital library and reading technologies to keep up with school assignments and to improve her reading comprehension skills. Megan just read the novel To Kill a Mockingbird in digital format for her English class. Her father said that, digital books and technologies gave his daughter “more learning confidence.” Read the full story.
Senator Harkin closed his remarks with this congratulatory message, “On behalf of tens of thousands of U.S. students with print disabilities, I say to Bookshare, U. S. teachers, parents and advocates everywhere who work on this effort — you have made a tremendous difference in the lives of students and individuals with print disabilities. You have achieved more than you set out to do, doubling your membership. Success begets success… so I hope you can quadruple this goal in the next 10 years. Congratulations!”
