Written by the Kurzweil Blog Team

"Where do I get content for my students?" This is a question we get asked a lot when we’re speaking with customers who use Kurzweil 3000. While you can scan in any document of your choice, there are also many resources for educators and students to download digital content directly into Kurzweil 3000. We want to make sure that you are aware of these resources. Two well-known sources for digital books are Bookshare and AccessText.

Bookshare is a vast resource containing over 190,000 titles. Their collection includes K-12 textbooks, college and university textbooks, classroom reading books, and special collections such as Newberry and Caldecott winners. Bookshare is underwritten by a grant from the Office of Special Education Programs to allow free access to the Bookshare library for qualified students and schools.

AccessText is a service that connects college and university disability service offices with textbook publishers to help the schools obtain the textbooks in digital format. These electronic textbooks are made available to higher education students who have print disabilities.

We recently held webinars with both organizations and demonstrated how Kurzweil 3000 seamlessly works with each service. Kurzweil Educational Systems and Bookshare have worked together to integrate Bookshare functionality into Kurzweil 3000 using Bookshare’s application program interface. Files supplied by AccessText can be easily opened, either as PDF or Word documents, within Kurzweil 3000. Once in Kurzweil 3000, students can use the full suite of Kurzweil 3000’s reading, writing, studying, and test-taking tools with these digital files.

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