Thursday, July 4, 2013

Bookshare & Compatible apps for Print Disabilities


Bookshare
   Share Via Twitter

Bookshare is an excellent resource for individuals with print disabilities or physical disabilities where a reader cannot hold a book.  Bookshare provides recorded books, including DAISY format, web readers and more. There are a variety of books, textbooks, newspapers and periodicals- including the latest and most popular selections for all ages- currently 197,988 titles in the collection. The great news is qualifying students and schools in the United States can access Bookshare for FREE! There are subscriptions available to qualifying individuals in many parts of the world as well. More information on Bookshare is available here.



Bookshare has its own app available, Read2Go (by Benetech, $19.99, iPhone/ iPad compatible); see video here

Some app developers have caught on to the importance of Bookshare and are Bookshare compatible.

Voice Dream Reader allows access to Bookshare for those that have an account. It also has many useful features for dyslexics as well as for those with vision impairment.  FULL REVIEW HERE

Read&Write Gold from Texthelp has an entire series of web apps to help struggling readers. Their web app, Ebook Reader, works with their Read&Write Gold program to read aloud Bookshare books with highlighting tools, a built-in dictionary and more. If you own their software, access is free.  More information on the software here. You will be happy to know they have an iPad app too, iReadWrite ( FULL REVIEW HERE; see video of app here).

Kurzweil 3000 supports Bookshare and has many other features such as brainstorming and outline tools, auditory spell check, text to speech etc.  More information here.  For subscribers, there is a free iPad app also, firefly K3000

For More Supports & Apps for Struggling or Reluctant Readers/Writers, see here.





3 comments:

  1. Amy! Thank you for sharing out Bookshare apps and information about our library and FREE education resources for members who qualify. I'd like to add the GoREAD for Android devices.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thankx for sharing this article. Its really informative article. I really enjoy your site I am waiting for new article. cardboard presentation boxes.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for taking the time to put this awesome guide together for the community. Greatly appreciated. Visit for more info soap packaging boxes!

    ReplyDelete