A Media Specialist's Guide to the Internet: Special Education

I am fortunate to have had blind young man working for me in the media center. His positive attitude and spirit lift me daily, and he never ceases to amaze me with his ability to navigate the computer lab and library. There are so many things that the sighted world takes for granted, and Matt reminds me of these things every day. Today I learned about Bookshare®, (2012 Reader's Choice Award winner from eSchool Media) a site which is an online library of digital books for people with print disabilities. It operates under an exception to U.S. copyright law which allows copyrighted digital books to be made available to people with qualifying disabilities. I can't wait to share the site with Matt, as well as our special education teachers, as I know our students will find it invaluable. As described on their site, "members with visual impairments can listen to books with using a text-to-speech synthesized voice, read books in Braille, or access the material in large print. Members can read books on a computer or a variety of portable devices, either visually and with text-to-speech as desired. Members with severe dyslexia typically benefit from access to the full text of books in digital format, for multi-modal reading with both visual and audio.(through synthetic text to speech)."

UPDATED 6/29/17

Here's a video of blind student Steffon Middleton using a portable Braille device to read digital books on Bookshare® :

Currently there are about 127,000 digital books, textbooks, teacher-recommended reading, periodicals and assistive technology tools.

Bookshare® has a long list of major donors, including Adobe Corporation, Mozilla Foundation, (their browser is FireFox) Microsoft Corporation and the U.S. Department of Education - Office of Special Education Programs.

Famous People with Disabilities

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
President George Bush (both)
Tom Cruise
Bill Gates
Steven Spielberg
Sylvester Stallone
Ted Turner
Jules Verne

Asperger's Syndrome Characteristics (Autism)
Leonardo DaVinci
Peter the Great
Vincent Van Gogh
Socrates
George Washington

Asthma
Charles Dickens
Che Guevara
Bob Hope
John F. Kennedy
Elizabeth Taylor

Cerebral Palsy
Christy Brown
Stephen Hawking
Geri Jewell

Diabetes
Halle Berry
Aretha Franklin
Bret Michaels
Mary Tyler Moore
Sugar Ray Robinson
Mia Sorvino
Sonya Sotomayer

Club Foot/Feet
Gary Burghoff
Mia Hamm
Dudley Moore
Kristi Yamaguchi
Daymon Wayans

Dyslexia
Cher
Agatha Christie
Tom Cruise
Albert Einstein
Whoopi Goldberg
Bruce Jenner
Magic Johnson

Epilepsy
Richard Burton
Agatha Christie
Edgar Allen Poe
Theodore Roosevelt
Peter Tchaikovsky
Neil Young

Mood Disorders
Jim Carrey
Winston Churchill
Carrie Fisher
Billy Joel
Ben Stiller

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (O.C.D.)
Jessica Alba
David Beckham
Penelope Cruz
Cameron Diaz
Harrison Ford
Howard Hughes
Howie Mandell
Roseanne
Justin Timberlake

Fonts for Students with Dyslexia

1. Dyslexie