Join Bookshare’s Worldwide 10th Anniversary Celebration!
Yes, Bookshare is now 10 years old, and we invite you to join a virtual worldwide celebration!
For a decade, we’ve been bringing reading to life for people with print disabilities, and we’ve been bringing reading to the lives of many who were hungry for access to content, be it for school or reading pleasure. We’ve accomplished this by knocking down barriers to access, collaborating with great partners, and inventing new, easy-to-use technologies. We pioneered a new approach to libraries for individuals with print disabilities and we let Members decide what they wanted to add to the collection.
To remind ourselves how far we have come, we gathered stories from early Members about the “old” days and published them in Arkenstone and early Bookshare blogs, shared them at a recent ATIA party with attendees and long-time partners – Don Johnston, Kurzweil, Freedom Scientific, HumanWare, Plextalk, and Texthelp, and even produced a fun and entertaining Anniversary video.
Video Marks Ten Years of Innovation
And now we want to celebrate the progress with our Members, partners, educators, and friends around the world. However, since our work is not done, we want to use this occasion to generate more awareness and support for the work that lies ahead.
To involve as many as we can, we invite you all to join a worldwide virtual celebration! We plan to make the celebration last all year. Every month there will be a different theme, and with every theme, there will be suggestions of activities, of things you can do in your communities and schools to bring others into the mission and help the mission achieve even more breakthroughs in the next 10 years. For example, this month to celebrate you could:
- Tweet or post an anniversary greeting as a comment on this blog, Twitter or Facebook.
- Buy cupcakes in honor of Bookshare for your school principal and teachers.
- Print the Bookshare data sheet from our site and give it to your local librarian.
- Subscribe to this blog to follow the themes and activities every month.
- Visit our Contribute page and make a small donation to help us bring more accessible books to people with print disabilities.
Our joy in this anniversary comes from the joy we have brought to others. Let’s have fun and celebrate!
Students with Print Disabilities Can Participate in Battle of the Books
Students with print disabilities, such as blindness or low vision, a physical disability, or a severe learning disability like dyslexia, can participate in their school and state Battles of the Books!
What is “Battle of the Books” you might ask? It’s a voluntary incentive reading program for students in grades 3 to 12. Throughout the year, students read the books on the Battle lists and then compete in local battles or tournaments, answering questions about the books, like the College Bowl. Winning teams may compete in their regional or state tournaments.
Participation in Battles would be difficult for students who have a hard time reading printed content. However, Bookshare now has a Special Collection with all the Battle books in accessible formats, so students with print disabilities can read with their preferred accommodations and compete. To download and read the books, students must be qualified for Bookshare and have a membership through their school or as an individual. Memberships are free for all U.S. students, thanks to an award from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs. Books are free for qualified students. There are no costs at all.
Battles typically occur in March or April, so there’s still time for students with print disabilities to read and participate. Schools with scheduled Battles, get your students with print disabilities involved. Or give the students time to read and schedule a Battle later this spring. It sounds like a fun way to read.
Who Needs Text-to-Speech and Why?
Text-to-speech helps those who cannot read print for a variety of reasons. To understand its use and benefits, let’s explore different reading styles that would benefit from text-t0-speech. These reading styles might qualify someone for a Bookshare membership; a qualified professional would make that decision.
Individuals who are blind depend on text-to-speech to navigate a computer. Those with low vision may or may not use text-to-speech, depending on the accommodations they need. Text-to-speech output can be used to read a book on a device, such as the devices from Plextalk and Humanware, or an computer, such as Kurzweil 1000 from Cambium Learning.
Individuals with severe learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, who have difficulty decoding and understanding text may comprehend printed content much better when it is read out loud. According to reports from teachers and students, these individuals may have substantial gains in reading scores and comprehension with multi-modal reading, when the text-to-speech is combined with word-by-word highlighting. For example, after introducing a student to Bookshare and multi-modal reading, one teacher reported a fifth grade student progressing from 65 to 76 to 103, between August and January as measured on the DIBELS reading assessment test.
Many text-to-speech software programs are available that provide a range of reading supports, including highlighting of text as it is read aloud, changing font type and size, and setting custom background and text colors. Some of these programs include Kurzweil 3000 by Cambium Learning Technologies, Read:OutLoud by Don Johnston, WYNN by Freedom Scientific, and Read & Write GOLD by Texthelp Systems.
Individuals with physical disabilities who cannot hold a book or turn its pages may or may not need text-to-speech output. The appropriate assistive technologies will provide these students with the accommodations, including text-to-speech, as needed to read independently
The assessment is the key determining factor in deciding whether or not a student will benefit from a text-to-speech output accommodation. A student who has difficulty decoding multisyllabic words, loses his or her place on the page, or has difficulty comprehending printed text, may benefit from text-to-speech output. It is the responsibility of the educators and therapists working with the student and the student’s IEP team to make that determination and document it in the IEP. Choosing the right software application for the student depends on matching the features of the software with the student’s needs.
It is possible to start a student using software that provides text-to-speech and word-by-word highlighting without a formal evaluation; however, to give that student access to Bookshare content, a qualified professional will have to certify that the student qualifies for Bookshare.
What can you do to help others who may benefit from TTS?
1. Learn more from one or more of these links:
Technology to Help Struggling Students
National Center on Accessible Instructional Materials
2. Show this short video about accessible books at a faculty meeting.
3. Take 3 minutes and learn about the Bookshare edition of Read:OutLoud.
Did you find this post helpful?
What Is Text-to-Speech?
Special education, assistive technology, and technology in general is chock full of jargon.
Bookshare uses terms that may seem like a foreign language, a fact I was recently reminded of while sharing a ride to Capitol Hill with a wise director from one of the many Parent Centers with whom we work. She encouraged me to stop talking like a PhD and to start talking like a “Ph-DO.”
Watch a short video showing text-to-speech with word-by-word highlighting.
To this end, we’ll dedicate this and future blog posts to making our terminology and technology more accessible to all. This week, we focus on “text-to-speech” or TTS for short.
What is it? If you already know what it is, please think about sharing this post with others who don’t.
Quite simply, TTS means reading text out loud using one of the voices in a device or computer. Sometimes you can do more with TTS, such as read words out loud and highlight them simultaneously. The combination enables multi-modal reading. The voices are computer-generated (versus recorded by humans), but the days of the tin can voices are long gone. Today, TTS voices are highly natural sounding and enjoyable. Here are some examples:
“The software offers text-to-speech,” which means that it reads the words out loud; the software could highlight words as well.
Watch text-to-speech and word-by-word highlighting.
For Read2Go, the Bookshare app for Apple devices (iOS) you can read in text only or text-to-speech mode with built-in voices. This means you can read it yourself or have the iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch read it to you. In TTS mode, you will simultaneously hear the words and see them highlighted.
Text-to-speech settings let you control which voice to use, how fast or slow you want the text read, and the pitch of the voice, among other settings which you can see in these two example screen shots.
The speech drop down menu in Read:OutLoud
Lots of our assistive technology (AT – another term we may tackle) partners offer text-to-speech, with simultaneous hearing and seeing highlighted words, including Cambium Learning’s Kurzweil 3000, Don Johnston’s Read:OutLoud, Freedom Scientific’s Wynn, and Texthelp’s Read&Write Gold.
Other partner devices offer text-to-speech that read text out loud, but don’t display text or highlight it, such as Plextalk and HumanWare.
The voice settings dialog box in Read:OutLoud
Supposing that this introduction helps you understand the basics of TTS, your next questions should be who needs it and why? Please come back for the next post. And if you know others who need to learn about TTS, please feel free to share the post.
Remember Arkenstone, before Bookshare?
In January every year, we often make resolutions and look forward in eager anticipation to the year ahead. However, January is also an opportune time to reflect on the past and remember what life was like just a short time ago.
For example, today we have Bookshare and its vast library, ease of access, and tools for reading. However, printed content has not always been this accessible to people with print disabilities. Bookshare represents huge advances in accessibility and availability of content for individuals with print disabilities.
The path to Bookshare, under the leadership of CEO Jim Fruchterman, begins in the late 1970’s. His story about learning pattern recognition technology that would guide a missile to its target is legendary. He realized that if software could recognize military targets, why couldn’t software recognize letters to help blind people read! His idea eventually led to the invention of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology that could read just about any document, the founding of Arkenstone, and the first affordable reading machines for the blind.
If you aren’t familiar with the story, it is well-told in two articles from th
e DAISY Planet and an article in MIT’s Innovations Journal.
Arkenstone at last gave Jim the ability to apply his idea and create a product for social good, his lifelong passion.
Jay Leventhal, an early fan of Jim’s, recently said:
At that time, Jim was a young scrapper of a man, a rocket scientist and engineer from Stanford, CA. He had a flare about him and an energy that could entice a crowd. His ability to engage people with enthusiasm and fantasy ideas was contagious. I believed in Jim and his vision to build a reading system for blind people through OCR.” (Optical Character Recognition) and I guess he decided to choose this direction of social good when one of his rockets exploded.
Jay’s belief was rewarded, and Jim’s vision came to fruition. Early users were thrilled with the change in their lives. Paul Henrichsen, one of the early users said:
I remember the old days with the TrueScan[i] board. We really thought we had something great! We could actually go to the bookstore, buy a book and scan it. We knew that if it took the OCR over two minutes to recognize a page, that there would probably be a poorly recognized page. If it was under two minutes, we knew we were in luck and would more than likely get a good scan.
We used to scan a book in batch mode without doing the OCR; then, when we went to bed, we would let the Arkenstone software do the recognition because it took six hours or more. We would laugh about how great it was and how we really thought we had something. Now, it takes seconds to OCR a page. I can’t tell you how many novels I scanned daily and then let them recognize at night while I was asleep. And, wasn’t that wonderful!”
Arkenstone changed the lives of families too. Mrs. Bryant, the mother of Zach Bryant, a young man with cerebral palsy, scanned a lot of books with Arkenstone. She said, “We saw Zach’s reading level jump three grades. What a difference assistive technologies can make.”
In the end, Arkenstone changed a tremendous number of lives. Reading machines that recognized more than a dozen languages were sold to over 35,000 individuals, schools and libraries in 60 countries. Arkenstone led breakthroughs in price barriers as well. As a deliberately non-profit social enterprise, Arkenstone steadily kept dropping the price of its reading machines, from $5000 to $1200. Access to content, instead of being affordable by a few hundred, became affordable by thousands. Arkenstone was one of the world’s most successful examples of a high technology social enterprise, using an innovative business model to achieve major social objectives in education, employment and independence. In 2000, a for-profit company bought the Arkenstone business assets. Jim changed the name of the nonprofit to Benetech and used the proceeds to start even more social enterprises.
To be continued: Stories about the early days of Bookshare. Please subscribe to the blog for the next installment.
If you’d like to contribute to the story of years ago, please add a comment!
[i] The TrueScan boardwas a card inserted into a PC specifically to perform OCR. PCs didn’t have enough processing power for OCR.
