Disabled Students Need Accessible Books

There was a time, not that long ago, when children who were blind, or had another kind of disability that prevented them from easily reading a printed book, were pretty much out of luck when it came to reading.

If a child with a print disability wanted to read a school textbook, or even a best-seller about their favorite sports star, he or she would hope that the book was among the 5% of books recorded on audiotape or published in Braille. If the child was lucky, they might have a family member who was willing to read to them out loud.

When inexpensive scanners became available in the mid-1990s, things began to change. People started scanning books using optical character recognition. This allowed people to transform text into speech using a voice synthesizer, enlarge the text for someone with low vision, or convert it into printed or electronic Braille.

OCR was a big step forward, but it takes three hours to scan a book. Imagine standing at the library photocopier making copies of all the pages of a book that you want to read. That's a big barrier to reading.

Many of us know families who have kids with severe print disabilities, especially dyslexia. We see the struggles these families face, helping their child who may have plenty of brains, but struggles hard to read. How can we help these students get an equal crack at opportunity?

School is a big enough challenge without a disability like blindness or dyslexia getting in the way. It's pretty obvious that if you can't succeed in school because you can't read your textbooks, you are going to have tough time succeeding in the workplace and navigating the information economy.

Twenty years, I developed the affordable Arkenstone reading machine for the blind which used OCR to scan books. But I was always looking for better technology to help disabled people read. The solution came to me one night back in 1999 when my then-14-year-old son, Jimmy, introduced me to a beta version of Napster. After spending an hour with Jimmy listening to music, I was hooked on this glorious technology - until I found out we weren't paying for the music.

But, it was so cool!

I asked my attorney, Gerry Davis, whether we could use Napster's peer-to-peer approach to content and get books to people with print disabilities. He came back with surprising news: there's a copyright law exemption that makes scanning books for people with disabilities legal. HuffPo readers might remember a recent post about the battles to extend the benefits of this exemption globally through an international treaty.

Our online digital library, Bookshare, was launched soon thereafter. My shorthand description of Bookshare is Amazon meets Napster meets Talking Books for the Blind, but legal.

How does it work? In the simplest terms, people scan books and we share them online with readers who have qualifying disabilities. It relies on you. If you love books, and want to see them available to people who desperately want equal access to literacy, volunteer to proofread a book for Bookshare.

The Bookshare collection has been built by a community of people with disabilities, their families, teachers and schools, as well as people who simply love books and want to help. You can help us out by donating your time, your books or funds to help us expand the library. World class authors and publishers have also given us permission to make their books available to Bookshare members worldwide and major university presses have donated electronic copies of their books.

Thanks for these efforts, Bookshare is adding more than 1,000 books a month and now offers more than 50,000 books in its collection. More than 60,000 members have unlimited access to Bookshare for a nominal subscription fee. Bookshare is used not just by blind people and people with learning disabilities, but also by readers with low vision and mobility impairments that makes it difficult to read a traditional book.

Every New York Times bestseller; every Newbery Award winning children's book, and many textbooks are available to Bookshare members. The U.S. Department of Education was so excited about this that it's paying for every American student, of any age, to get access to Bookshare and talking ebook software for free.

Many great organizations have stepped forward to partner with Bookshare. Online book vendor, Better World Books, chops and scans used books inside their book warehouse and uploads them for our volunteers to proofread. Technology companies around the world have developed applications that allow members to read Bookshare texts on their accessible mobile devices and cell phones.

Although we have the funding to provide a free library card to accessible books for every kid in the U.S. with a print disability, many people don't know about Bookshare. You can help by spreading the word, especially to students.

If you know of a person with a print disability who needs Bookshare, or a family whose child could benefit, let them know about the service. We are now building a movement to provide Bookshare to people with print disabilities around the world. We've already launched Bookshare in India at a deeply subsidized price - the equivalent of $8 a year. If you want to pitch in financially, you can help extend Bookshare to other developing countries.

We believe that people with print disabilities should have affordable, accessible technology that allows them to easily read. Everyone should have equal access to the world of ideas, to the text you are reading right now - to the information at your fingertips. Innovative technology, and your efforts, can deliver equal access to print for everybody.

Follow Jim Fruchterman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jrandomf

Comments

[Jim Fruchterman - Huffpost Blogger]

Thanks for the comments: wanted to reply as the original blog post author quickly to some of the questions:

Suzanne: the core of the issue is market failure. The publishers could be selling accessible books, but don't because of piracy fears (making something accessible makes it easier to copy) and lack of conviction that there's a market. So, solutions like Bookshare fill the gap. The fact that we need to have each Bookshare user provide independent certification of disability lessens publisher and author fears that the books will be pirated (among many other things we do).

Northside. Yes, it's an amazingly backwards thing that we end up scanning books that started life digitally. In the last two years, a whole bunch of publishers have signed up with Bookshare to give us digital files directly, such as HarperCollins, O'Reilly, Random House, Perseus, Hachette and this week, Encyclopaedia Britannica. We especially love XML files when we can get them.

Mommamia. We love volunteers! The link to volunteering is on the Bookshare home page and the direct link is: http://www.bookshare.org/about/volunteerOverview As far as the real challenges of having a student with a disability, we hear these stories everyday. As tech people, we're always trying to figure out how to do more to support students with disabilities and their parents and teachers. There's a lot more to do, and it's not all something that tech can help with.

Jim Fruchterman

[sro798]

Bookshare is an amazing contribution to society. The books can be read aloud on e-readers or produced in electronic Braille (blind people have special keyboards for this), or can be printed in large print. It helps people with vision impairments, those with learning disabilities and those who can not physically hold a book -- a huge swarth of our nation's K-12 population, who get all these books for free! If you're not a student it's inexpensive to use the service. Publishers have their work cut out for them - it makes it easier for them to meet "equal access" laws without having to give away the store. As for audio books, today most gadgets -- from computers to the Kindle -- have a built-in ability to "talk" but publishers still want a piece of this pie. They give the disabled this "privilege" through Bookshare but the rest of society would be breaking the law. This is a debate going on right now and will play out over the next few years. I'm sure Jim has insights on this as well. - Suzanne (www.abledbody.com)

[NorthSide]

I understand using an OCR machine to scan a printed work and then convert it to speech via a synthesizer. However, most text books today must have started as a computer file at some point, while the author was writing it or the editors were working on them. Can't these be converted to speech much more easily? Can you get copies of these files from the publishers?

The other question is one thing the posting does not mention: what do the publishers think of this? How does this sharing system affect copyright? I remember something a while back about disabling the Kindle's text-to-voice capability to avoid problems with the audiobook market. While that was mostly about bestsellers, the question does come up.

[mommamia526]

I think it might help if a contact is given here for people who want to help with proofreading, etc. It can probably be added to this blog right now.

[mommamia526]

There is, in theory, a lot of help available for the disabled student. The prqctice, however, is a little different. Even in families with awareness of the problem and where parents are very active in getting the students the help they need, it is most of the time not available. Help is, in theory, also available on the College Level and beyond, but I have not seen it in practice. It is so frustrating for these students, because most of them are intelligent and motivated. In the long run, however, they resign themselves to the idea that others are smarter. Not at all the case. I knew one who could solve all sorts of technical problems at a very early age, get machines to run which no one could repair, and could read very well at age 5. He is funny, smart and has excellent conversation. Career-wise, however, things do not look good.

[mommamia526]

I like this blog. However, means to help students with ADHD, dyslexia and other relevant disabilities has already been discoverd, but they are not implemented in the schools. Whether a student gets help or not depends on whether or not a teacher is available. As a mother of a child with ADHD and a whole series of associated problems, one must go out and find means to help the child oneself. Such a parent may find, that matters are not any better for the second generation. And, the disabilities are not all the same. One child may have behavior problems and dyslexia, the next one may not be able to physically write, but knows how to read quite well, spells correctly, etc. So, if a child can not write, but spells correctly, how do things work out? He/she knows all the spelling words on the list, and can spell them frontwards and backwards, but, since he/she can not write, this student gets a zero on the spelling test. And try to write an essay! Such children are logically helped with the same means as some blind students, i.e. computers with voice recognition, etc. Sometimes phasing of computers may also be done for students with ADHD. The most important need, however, is excellent teaching help. Teachers who ae able to diagnose and adapt to the student. These students are all different, and all learn differently.