The world’s largest online accessible library for people with print disabilities, Bookshare is an initiative of Benetech, a Palo Alto, CA-based nonprofit group aiming to create sustainable technology to help solve pressing social needs. Through technology initiatives and partnerships, Bookshare seeks to raise the floor on accessibility issues so that individuals with print disabilities have the same ease of access to print materials as people without disabilities.

In 2007, Bookshare received a five-year award from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP), to provide free access for all U.S. students with a qualified print disability. This will benefit more than 80,000 Bookshare members who are blind or who have low vision, a physical disability, or a severe learning disability that affects reading. One to two percent of the U.S. population has print disabilities that qualify them for Bookshare.

Bookshare members benefit from a large collection of accessible books, more than 70,000, thanks to partnerships with more than 45 publishers from all sectors of the publishing industry including trade publishers, university presses, children’s book publishers, and K-12 and post-secondary educational publishers. Trade publishers include Random House, Simon and Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette, and O’Reilly Media. K-12 and higher education publishers include Scholastic, Encyclopedia Britannica, Mason Crest, The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), and Flat World Knowledge. University Press partners include University of Chicago Press, University of California Press, MIT, and Columbia University Press.

Copyrighted books are protected by Bookshare’s digital rights management technology and are available only to those with a documented print disability. Bookshare maintains rigorous qualification standards to prevent books from being distributed to unqualified individuals and operates under an exemption in the U.S. copyright law called the Chafee amendment. The Chafee amendment enables nonprofit and government entities to create accessible versions of copyrighted works and distribute them freely to individuals with print disabilities.

Bookshare accepts publishers’ electronic files, preferably in the EPUB file format, and converts those files into DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) and BRF (Braille Ready Format) formats. DAISY files are versatile electronic files that allow students with print disabilities to easily navigate a book to a specific page or chapter, manipulate the appearance of text and pages, and select preferred voices and rate of speed to support individual reading styles. DAISY also enables multi-modal reading by highlighting text that is simultaneously spoken in computer-generated speech.

Publishers interested in contributing content to the Bookshare library can contact Robin Seaman, Publisher Liaison (robins@Benetech.org). Additional information on Bookshare is available at http://www.bookshare.org/