All Together We Can

by Samuel Sennott

Have you seen the new Bookshare.org website?

Image from the home page of Bookshare.org

Did you know these three things about Bookshare.org?

1. Bookshare™ is free for all U.S. students with qualifying disabilities. Student memberships are currently funded by an award from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP).
2. Bookshare dramatically increases the accessibility of books. Bookshare believes that people with disabilities deserve the same ease of access to books and periodicals that people without disabilities enjoy.
3. A searchable online library. Bookshare offers more than 42,000 digital books, textbooks, teacher-recommended reading, periodicals and assistive technology tools.

If you would like to learn more about Bookshare.org and accessible books in general, I interviewed Jim Fruchterman, the CEO of Benetech, which is the organization behind Bookshare.  You can find the article in the Summer 2008 issue of SpeakUP, the magazine of USSAAC.  http://www.ussaac.org/speakup.html Additionally, in that article section, I interviewed Joe Rickerson, founder of The Accessible Book Collection, www.accessiblebookcollection.org and Joy Zabala, of CAST’s AIM Consortium, http://aim.cast.org.  Just imagine what our students can do with resources like Bookshare.org combined with low cost netbooks!

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