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Sponsored by Onkyo Corporation and The Braille Mainichi The submission deadline for this contest is April 30, 2010.  The Onkyo Braille essay contest is being administered by the National Federation of the Blind on behalf of the North America-Caribbean Region of the World Blind Union. Essays must be written by contest participants, in English or their native language, in Braille, and must be completely original in nature. Entries should be no fewer than 800 words and no more than 1,000 words in length. There will be two groups of competitors—one Junior group, aged 25 and under; and one Senior group, aged 26 and up and prizes range from $500-$2,000.

More than doubling the number of books available to print disabled people of all ages, today the Internet Archive launched a new service that brings free access to more than 1 million books – from classic 19th Century fiction and current novels to technical guides and research materials – now available in the specially designed format to support those who are blind, dyslexic or otherwise visually impaired.

The reader can read digital files of books aloud. It can also capture images from any printed material and use its text-to-speech technology to read aloud the publication at a variety of listening speeds. It also has a four-inch color display that can render the words being read in large font sizes. The device can read millions of books that have been formatted online for visually-impaired readers, and it comes with a high-resolution camera that can convert printed text to digital text. The reader can then read the words aloud to the user. It can even work with web pages if users first capture the text from a site in a plain text file.

Wade Kuntz, a Libby native, poses with his guide dog, Casey. Kuntz attributes the support he received growing up in Libby to helping him succeed in life despite visual and hearing impairments.

But Speer doesn't read the books herself. She is legally blind and relies on a machine to read them to her. She has been receiving talking books from the Montana State Library for the past 10 years, but now they are making it a little bit easier for her to read her favorite mystery novel.