[real-eyes] Fwd: [Beneblog: Technology Meets Society] Bookshare International Now Serves Thirty Countries
- From: Terrie Lee <terrieiphone@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Missouri List <Missouri-l@xxxxxxxxxxx>, real-eyes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2012 19:27:58 -0600
passing this along to the list
Terrie l.arnold
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Jim Fruchterman" <jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: February 9, 2012 6:53:31 PM CST
To: terrie arnold <Terrieiphone@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Beneblog: Technology Meets Society] Bookshare International Now
Serves Thirty Countries
People with print disabilities around the world have a right to high-quality
ebooks that they can read with assistive technology. Benetechâ??s Bookshare
library continues to expand its international service providing accessible
books and publications to members in more than 30 countries. Our international
Bookshare service recently announced new partnerships with three organizations
that are reaching out to readers with print disabilities in their home
countries. These partners include the Norwegian Library of Talking Books and
Braille (NLB), the Hoerbuecherei des OSBV Talking Book Library in Austria, and
the Dorina Nowill Foundation in Brazil.â?¨ Benetech looks forward to working
with all these groups to provide the latest books, especially textbooks
(primarily in English). â?¨These ebooks can quickly be turned into Braille,
large print or be read aloud by a synthetic voice synthesizer.
Bookshare International members now have access to more than 50,000 titles,
including books in Spanish, German, French, Hindi, and Tamil, and a collection
of textbooks in Afrikaans. Our Bookshare team has also been working on a
special project with Qatarâ??s Mada Assistive Technology Center to add
Arabic-language books to the collection. These texts will be available in
early 2012.
After books are scanned and uploaded into the digital Bookshare library, they
are still used in their printed form by readers around the world. In the rural
region of Ranipet in Tamil Nadu, India, 500 Bookshare texts, which had their
spines removed for scanning, have been acquired by the Vedavalli Vidyalaya
school. Vedavalli Vidyalaya serves more than 20 villages in and around Ranipet
and is one of the few schools in a 100-mile radius to deliver high-quality
education to students who cannot travel to the nearest city of Chennai. This is
the areaâ??s very first library and we are told that the kids there very happy
to have access to these books. The texts have all been nicely rebound, thanks
to Bookshareâ??s local book processing partner, Worth Trust.
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