Sector(s)

Team Members

czunigaco, shiraz, kimurphy, paulsheldrake, jasonsavino, dbeyer, kwhite, danny englander, shiraz dindar, blanca.esqueda, MarcBeyer, kwhite

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Organizations Involved

Community contributions

We supplied support to LingoTek module by providing troubleshooting details for a critical entity bug.

Across the globe, an estimated 1.3 billion people live with some form of distance or near vision impairment. That’s a staggering number that doesn’t even begin to include the 700 million people with dyslexia, 10 million with Parkinson's disease, or the many other disabilities that make reading printed text difficult or impossible.

Without access to books in accessible formats, print disabilities can create an insurmountable barrier to information that can limit the potential of billions of people of all ages, across the globe.

Benetech is helping address this issue by making more than 700,000 titles available in accessible online formats through its Bookshare project. With features that include searchable text, synchronized text and audio, highlighting, and customizable font size and contrast, Bookshare gives people with reading barriers new opportunities for learning and literacy. And thanks to a recent partnership with Kanopi Studios, Bookshare can quickly expand to serve developing nations in any language.

About the project

Expanding accessible reading across the globe
Benetech’s goal is to be able to easily create Bookshare sites to serve every nation across the globe. To do that, they needed to expand their ability to translate the site into new languages as quickly and simply as possible. 

Kanopi’s development team provided front and back-end development of the platform in Drupal, partnering with LingoTek for translation functionality and implementing the designs that Benetech provided. 

A Kanopi team member’s young daughter has dyslexia and volunteered to help test the site’s design, offering feedback on fonts and text sizes that were difficult to read. She joined a group of print disabled users on the Benetech team to help ensure that the site upheld AAA accessibility standards, the highest level of accessibility for the web. 

Kanopi’s work resulted in the ability to create a fully-functional, Bookshare website in less than two hours and complete translation within two weeks. Before the project, similar work would have taken more than two months. 

In addition to planning and building the framework, the Kanopi team supported translation and deployment of new sites for five countries, including:

  • Bolivia
  • India
  • Kenya
  • Peru
  • and Tanzania

to be translated into seven languages ...

  • English
  • Spanish
  • Swahili
  • Hindi
  • Marathi
  • Tamil
  • and Telugu

… all within an incredibly rapid two-month timeframe. 

Supporting continued growth
With near-future plans to translate the site into more than 100 languages, there is incredible potential for Kanopi Studios to support Benetech’s goal of offering Bookshare in every nation across the globe. 

We’re incredibly proud of this work to unlock the power of reading, allowing people of all abilities access to printed materials that can expand their success in school, their ability to find jobs, and their pure enjoyment of everyday life.

Why Drupal was chosen

For the Bookshare Project, Benetech needed a flexible content management system that could support a deep integration with their API as well as multilingual capabilities. We enhanced Drupal 8’s core translation modules with the LingoTek module, which allowed us to get the site translated into as many languages as we wanted.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen
  • Bootstrap Paragraphs module was chosen to quickly implement a Bootstrap theme, allowing us to focus on the deep integration with the Bookshare API.
  • The LingoTek module in particular was chosen since the client would have otherwise needed to source translators for over 100 languages, which would have been exorbitantly expensive if not impossible to do.