DOE Awards $32 Million Grant to Bookshare.org

SLJ Staff -- School Library Journal, 10/24/2007 8:05:00 AM

A $32 million U.S. Department of Education grant to Bookshare.org promises a surge in reading materials for blind and other disabled children for years to come.

Bookshare.org is an online community that allows people with print disabilities to legally download books and periodicals to be read as Braille, large print, or synthetic speech. Eligible disabilities include blindness, low vision, severe dyslexia, or mobility impairments that prevent the use of traditional print materials.

Bookshare is the world's largest accessible library of scanned books and periodicals. Its goal is to give all 
K-12, postsecondary, and graduate students in the United States who have qualifying disabilities access to its library cost-free.

The new, five-year award will allow Palo Alto, CA-based Benetech to add more than 100,000 new educational books to its Bookshare collection, which currently hosts 34,000 titles. The project also will coordinate with state education agencies, schools, and publishers to deliver high-quality content at a relatively low cost. Bookshare will further use textbook files from the recently mandated National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard, to make high quality, student-ready materials in digital audio, large print, or Braille.

"We are going to reach out to every student, every family with a disabled student, and every school in the U.S. to offer them a chance to join the Bookshare.org community for free and transform the practice of making books accessible," says Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman. "We expect to deliver millions of books to students through this new program over the next five years."