The Need for Support

What Your Gift Means to RFB&D's Boston Unit

$ 57 enables RFB&D to produce and circulate a copy of one textbook to a student with a disability

$ 75 covers the cost of enrolling one Massachusetts student as an RFB&D member

$ 171 pays for the average number of audio books a student needs for one course

$ 275 pays for an adapted playback device and headphones for one low-income student

$ 425 provides audio books to 25 Massachusetts students with disabilities through a school membership

$ 600 cover the cost of providing playback software for four school libraries, enabling 100 students with disabilities to have access to RFB&D's audio books

$1,000 establishes a listening station used by 40 students in a resource room in an underserved inner city school

$2,096 underwrites the production of one new digital audio book for the RFB&D library

Funding Priorities

RFB&Dis a nonprofit organization that relies upon financial donations from individuals and organizations to support our overarching mission: to level the educational playing field for students with print disabilities. Private funding enables us to produce recorded books and academic materials not available anywhere else. Support from our donors also fuels our efforts to reach out to educators and bring audio book programs to local schools and other educational institutions so that their students can have the access to curriculum they need to be successful learners.

Our current program priorities that need your support are described in the links below.

Production of Accessible Educational Resources

RFB&D's Learning Through Listening® Programs for Schools

RFB&D's Learning Through Listening® Programs for Individual Students

Development and Testing of Alternate Recording Styles for Students with Learning Disabilities

Why We Need You

Production of Accessible Educational Resources

Imagine not being able to see these words or to understand what they mean. That challenge faces hundreds of thousands of people around the world who have low vision, learning disabilities such as dyslexia or physical disabilities and for whom print is a barrier between them and learning. RFB&D and the Boston Unit helps to remove this barrier through its robust production of audio books and other educational materials in a range of academic subject areas and grade levels. Audio book production continues to be a core priority of the Boston Unit and needs supports from the community. Of particular importance right now is the additional new specialty books to the RFB&D library, particularly the difficult to produce audio books in math, science, engineering, technology and other disciplines.

Donors may support this program by "adopting" a text, which supports production costs of one digital book produced by the Boston Unit. Donors may also fund the production of a collection of texts in a specific subject area or for a specific school district. Past donations to the Boston Unit have underwritten collections of books in civics and government, science and technology, human services and the humanities, as well as a collection of children's literature used in the Boston Public Schools and digital textbooks for college students and adult learners.

Donations to support the productions of new audio books can be acknowledged in the opening and closing announcements of each books, well-suited for memorial and honorary gifts.

The cost of adopting one new audio textbook produced by the Boston Unit is $1,000.

RFB&D's Learning Through Listening™ Programs for Schools

According to the Massachusetts Department of Education, 150,003 public school students in the state of Massachusetts are classified as special education students. This figure represents 15.4 percent of the total student enrollment in the Commonwealth's public schools. Of that total, 81,442 students have learning disabilities and a majority have reading disabilities such as dyslexia. One of the greatest academic struggles for these students is simply keeping up with reading and classroom assignments, because they do not have access to the curriculum that they are required to master at grade level.

Many students with learning disabilities have found that using audio books while reading along in the print version of the same book can help. However, less than 6,500 public school students in Massachusetts are using audio books at school, and only 450 schools and districts out of more than 1800 public schools have audio book programs for their special education students.

RFB&D Boston Unit's educational outreach program staff works in schools throughout the state so that educators can discover the benefits of using RFB&D's recorded texts and literature books and implement audio book programs in their classrooms. Our staff helps schools with program start-up and provides training to teachers and students and ongoing technical assistance to facilitate the use of audio books in a variety of educational settings within a school

Funding of educational outreach is a priority for the Boston Unit and is especially critical now as we continue to implement digital audio book programs locally. Donations to this program will provide seed support to schools, specifically those in low-income communities such as Boston, Springfield, Worcester, Cambridge, Lawrence, Lowell, Chelsea and many other cities where school resources are limited. Support includes a one-year membership in RFB&D, which provides access to the master audio library; playback equipment for listening stations at the schools; and training for students, teachers and parents. This support defrays the start-up costs to the schools, which can range from $4,000-$9,000.

RFB&D's Learning Through Listening® Programs for Individual Students

In conjunction with our school-based outreach and training program, the Boston Unit provides support to students with disabilities whose family incomes prohibit them from having individual memberships in RFB&D. Although some of these youngsters may use audio books at school, for the most part,they are unable to take the audio books and the playback equipment home. As a result this critical resource is not available to them for completing homework assignments, studying for tests, or even engaging in pleasure reading.

Development and Testing of Alternate Recording Styles for Students with Learning Disabilities

Over the years, the profile of the students using RFB&D's audio books has altered significantly. While we still continue to serve a steadily growing number of students who are blind and visually impaired, the number of consumers with learning disabilities has spiked dramatically. In Massachusetts alone, 74 percent of RFB&D members had learning disabilities last year.

With the change in our consumer population has come a growing understanding of the needs of our newer members with regards to the way in which our audio books are presented. For example, there is some evidence that students with learning disabilities would greatly benefit from using audio books that are produced with a prosodic read. This type of reading injects auditory cues, including voice reflection, strategic pauses and a slower reading pace overall. In addition, other potential strategies for enhancing our audio books include the use of learning strategies that would be added into the audio texts. For example, the book may direct the student to look ahead through a chapter and predict what the content will be about, or to look back on what has been read and answer specific questions about the content.

The unit tested this type of reading at an elementary school last year and will be expanding the study during the 2003-2004 school year. What we learn from studies like these could guide how we produce audio books in the future.

Why We Need You

The production of accessible educational resources at the Boston Unit is fueled by the combined efforts of 250 local residents who volunteer in the Boston studio regularly. Studio volunteers are literally involved in every phase of book production, including text preparation, reading and directing and post-production quality control.

Among the most challenging of books to produce are those in technical specialty areas, such as science, mathematics, finance, engineering and technology. These books are often long and contain large volumes of information. Because of the technical nature of these texts, only volunteers with the expertise and experience in these fields can read them. The Boston Unit needs support for the recruitment of qualified specialist volunteers so that we can begin to eliminate waiting lists for books in technical subject areas. Over the next year, we will engage in a comprehensive study of this market and will develop a recruitment campaign to attract and retain qualified readers in these fields.