visual impairments Archives - Page 9 of 14

Published March 27, 2013

New Partnership with Lions Club International

With great pleasure, we welcome our newest partner, Lions Club International. For almost 100 years, Lions Clubs International has sponsored programs to help people with vision loss, including restoring eyesight, better eye care, braille literacy, and access to assistive technology. Through their Reading Action Program, Lions encourages programs that support the advancement of literacy around the world. They believe literacy is tremendously important because “it forms the basis for individual academic, occupational, and social success, and can also empower communities to fight poverty, reduce child mortality, achieve gender equality, and ensure peace and democracy.”1 The Reading Action Program “is a…

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Published March 12, 2013

Web Reader Screen Shortcuts and Educator Tips

The Bookshare Web Reader makes it easy to preview or read Bookshare books because you don’t need to download and unzip them. It’s a quick way to preview a book or read it in its entirety. Below are some shortcuts. Do you use a screen reader? You can use your screen reader with Internet Explorer 9, Safari, or a recent version of Firefox to read with Bookshare Web Reader. To start, find a book, then select the “Read Now” link. Expect to hear an announcement saying that your book is being packaged. Once complete, Bookshare Web Reader will open, and the…

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Published March 11, 2013

BYU Peery Entrepreneurship Program and Bookshare Partnership

Bookshare has developed innovative technology to make textbooks more accessible to blind and visually impaired students. Before now, blind and visually impaired students missed out on thousands of images in their textbooks. Imagine studying science without being able to see the charts, graphs or diagrams in your textbook! Using a simple on-line tool we call Poet, our volunteers write vital descriptions for textbook images. On March 4, Brigham Young University students sponsored a competition among campus-based church groups to write image descriptions in textbooks for Bookshare members. Dozens of students participated in the two-hour challenge, writing over 600 descriptions…

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Published February 26, 2013

Plan Your CSUN Schedule

Are you going to CSUN? Look for our booth, #712, in the conventional hall and stop by for a demo and training on the new tools, Bookshare Web Reader and Bookshelf. Here’s quick look at all the Bookshare presentations, trainings, and events. Mark your calendars with items of interest. Event Day Time Location Presenter Latest Developments in Math Accessibility Fri 8:00 am Ford C, 3rd floor Anh Bui Born Accessible: Inclusive Publishing Thur 1:50 pm Ford C, 3rd floor Betsy Beaumon Reading Technology: What Works? Thur 9:20 am Ford C, 3rd floor Kristina Cohen and guest teacher from SDUSD Making…

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Published December 21, 2012

“Bookshare Made a Difference” Contest Winners

Congratulations to all participants in the “Bookshare Made a Difference” Contest. This year, 210 people submitted entries, and over 2,000 people participated in the public voting! All entries were wonderful and very moving; there were some close votes. From your stories, you are all winners! So who are the prize winners? Drum roll please… The Grand Prize goes to Katy Noelani Kingery, the author of the entry, “From Baby Honu to the Ocean!“ The 2nd and 3rd place winners were a tie! Congratulations to Teresa Paporello, the author of the very moving poem, “An Ode to Bookshare” And to Elizabeth (Beth) Heintz…

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Published November 6, 2012

American Bar Association Titles in Bookshare

As Bookshare followers know, many publishers have relationships with us and submit files electronically. Recently, The American Bar Association (ABA) submitted a series of titles from the Legal Practice Management division that produces books to help lawyers in their work. Today, Election Day 2012, seems like a fitting day to tell readers about these legal works. There are many titles of interest to law students and practicing lawyers on building a practice, using social media, using technology, and more. Below are links to ten: iPad Apps In One Hour for Lawyers – Finding the best apps often can be an…

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Published October 24, 2012

New Deaf and Deaf-Blindness Special Collection

We are proud to announce that Bookshare has a new Special Collection on Deaf and Deaf-Blindness. Now, rather than doing a subject search, books on these subjects can be found in one place. (If this link doesn’t work for you, go to the Bookshare homepage and choose “and more…” under the Browse Booklist link, where you’ll find our full list of Special Collections.) The current 200+ books gathered into one easy-to-locate group are categorized by topic: Culture, Biography/Autobiography, Sign Language/Training, Other Nonfiction, and Fiction. (Please note—while all fictional books have deaf characters, some are very minor or poorly portrayed.) Books…

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Published August 2, 2012

A Computer Science Degree to a Job with Bookshare

I learned about Bookshare in 2004 just before my senior year of high school. Bookshare wasn’t free for qualified students back then, so I paid for my first subscription with money I received for my high school graduation. I joined six weeks before I started college, knowing I would need as many sources of accessible materials as possible. While there weren’t many textbooks, I thought I would find materials that would help with research papers. However, another use was rather surprising. For a political science class, I was required to read the newspaper, e.g. The New York Times, several times…

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Published July 18, 2012

Non-English Accents in Braille

A guest post from a member of the Bookshare Collection Development team and a Bookshare Member, Liz Halperin. Ever wonder how braille handles non-English accent marks? Things like umlauts or tildes or other accent marks from Spanish, French, German, Danish, Polish, and so on? Remember, in braille, everything happens with just 6 dots (or 8 dots for digital or computer braille) in a group. (See other resources about basic braille structure of dots and cells, uncontracted and contracted braille, etc.) So how can braille indicate there is an accent mark over the e in the French word café or the…

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Published July 5, 2012

Planning a Trip with Bookshare

The communication below from Bookshare member Gayle Yarnall, recently retired from The Perkins School for the Blind, inspired a blog about planning a trip with Bookshare. A year ago, almost exactly, we booked tickets for a retirement trip to Paris, and six months after that we booked an apartment through VRBO.com. Now it was up to me to plan the trip. For me, one of the best things about planning a trip is reading all I can about where I am going. You could read books about Paris, by Paris writers and about people who wrote about Paris for the…

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Category: visual impairments