Making the Digital Humanities More Open [Final Performance Report]

Making the Digital Humanities More Open, a level 2 Digital Humanities Start Up grant funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities on April 19, 2012, was a partnership between the University of South Carolina Upstate and the University of Maryland's Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). Led by Dr. George Williams of USC Upstate as well as Dr. Jennifer Guiliano of MITH, along with a team composed of Dr. Tina Herzberg (USC Upstate), Mr. Jim Smith (MITH), Ms. Amanda Visconti (MITH), Mr. Cory Bohon (independent scholar), and Ms. Kirsten Keister (MITH), the “Making the Digital Humanities More Open” team completed the design, development, and deployment of a WordPress‐based accessibility tool creates braille content for endusers who are blind or have low vision. Over the last several decades, scholars have developed standards for how best to create, organize, present, and preserve digital information so that future generations of teachers, students, scholars, and librarians may still use it. What has remained neglected for the most part, however, are the needs of people with disabilities. As a result, many of the otherwise most valuable digital resources are useless for people who are blind or have low vision. This project created a free and easy‐to‐use plug in for WordPress that create braille texts from WordPress posts, allowing digital humanities projects to share the products of their text‐based projects with this often‐neglected audience of readers.