What is Bookshare & How do I read their books?  

Bookshare is an online accessible library available for people with qualifying disabilities. Students with print disabilities, can have free access to Bookshare books which can then be read many different ways. You can 
  • Listen to books with high quality text-to-speech voices
  • Hear and see highlighted words on screen
  • Read with digital braille or enlarged fonts
  • Create physical braille or large print
  • Read directly from your Internet browser


Learning Specialists can sign-up students and download books for students, and students can also request an individual account so they can download books themselves. Depending on how the student is accessing Bookshare books depends on whether or not they need an individual account. There are some options for accessing books that will require students to have an individual account. 

Which brings us to the complicated part of Bookshare--accessing its books. Due to copyright and accessibility reasons, Bookshare books are not downloaded in a popular format, instead the file format is Daisy. 
Currently, we have ReadWriteGold which works with Daisy files, but some of the the programs features, such as highlighting, do not work with Daisy files. 
There are other options for reading Daisy files, however, each has its own quirk. 
Below is a table describing each program we currently have and its particular issues. 
 

Available Titles

A number of our textbooks & books for class are available through Bookshare. This document has a list of what's available. 

Moving Forward

 
There are lots of options for software moving forward. There are also some build-in features that come with the Mac and Adobe for text-to-speech.  It would be nice to streamline options and make a clear resource chart that could be regularly reviewed and updated, but in order to do that it makes sense to first figure out student needs to see what fits best. I'll be sending out a google sheet for you to fill out (no names, but please fill out the chart for each student). Later, on a case by case basis, we can discuss specific students and their schedules to make sure they'll have access to everything they need, but for now a general overview will help with this process of evaluation.