Books for children

october 29 2007

There's a group of children and young people who have problems reading, either due to visual problems or learningproblems.

The Fed Dept of Education of the USA funds free access to printmaterials for them.
This not only concerns coverstextbooks, but also the extensive library already online at Bookshare.org.

Bookshare.org recently got a major five-year award of $32 million from the Office of Special Education Programs of the U.S. federal Departmentof Education.
This funding is to fully support all schools and students 26 years old and under with qualifying print disabilities in the United States, K-12 and post-secondary.

These students will get access to the entire collection of accessible electronic books and to software forreading those books... for free.
That means they can access over 34,725 books and 150 periodicals that are converted to Braille, large printor text to speech audio files.

Expected is that over 100,000 new educational titles in high quality DAISY and Braille formats will be added to the collection over the next five years.