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Winning an award is a perfect beginning to a new year! eSchool Media has announced the winners of its 2012 Readers’ Choice Awards that recognize educational technology products and services, and Bookshare was chosen as one of the 50 winners! Readers of eSchoolNews.com, eCampusNews.com, and eClassroomNews.com voted for their top hardware, software, websites and services. From among 1400 votes describing how a product improves teaching, learning or school administration, Bookshare was selected as on of the top. The list of all 50 winners is posted on the eSchool news website. Many thanks to eSchool News for the recognition! 2012 is…

With over 125,000 books in Bookshare (see post), where have they all come from? During our last maintenance call for our in-office scanner, the technician couldn’t believe that we’d scanned over 2.6 million pages with this four-year-old machine.  We couldn’t believe it either. While more and more publishers are providing us with digital copies of their books to convert, we still do a healthy amount of processing content the old-fashioned way – chopping and scanning a physical book. Visitors to our processing offices are invited to “feed the beast” – under the watchful eyes of our scanning staff – and…

We are excited to announce that Bookshare now serves over 150,000 student members and has over 125,000 books in the collection.  Of these, 80,000 are educational titles that continue to pour into the library from publishers, as well as hundreds of student textbook requests that are fulfilled every month! These are major milestones that we have achieved a year ahead of schedule as part of our 5-year Bookshare for Education (B4E) award from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). We look forward to continuing our support of students with print disabilities. To this end, Benetech,…

October is National Dyslexia Awareness Month, and Bookshare invites you to help spread the word. Dyslexia is a language-based learning disability that results in people having difficulties with specific language skills, particularly reading.  You can learn more about dyslexia by visiting the International Dyslexia Association website. Individuals with severe cases of dyslexia may find it very difficult or virtually impossible to read traditional print books. Bookshare makes printed text accessible to people with print disabilities like dyslexia, visual impairments, and physical disabilities by allowing them to listen to books with highly natural text-to-speech voices, read multi-modally (see and hear words…

A guest post from Munawar Bijani, whom we met at ACB in Reno, NV, 2011. We asked him to write about Three-D Velocity, his flight simulator game for people who are blind. Munawar is a currently a student at University of Central Florida. His site also has other real-time and turn-based games for people who are blind or visually impaired. Flying Faster, Higher We’ve heard of blind people driving cars because of the National Federation of the Blind’s Blind Driver’s Challenge. We’ve heard of blind people driving tanks, piloting submarines, and participating in races thanks to audio games. Still, there…