Invitation to Apply
Beyond Books Program
We invite educators in your district to participate in the Beyond Books Program for the 2026–27 school year — a chance to give every student equitable access to the materials they read every day, at no cost, with hands-on support from the Benetech team.
Access to Bookshare Plus
You already use Bookshare to give students with print disabilities access to books. Bookshare Plus extends that access to everything else — the PDFs, slides, worksheets, handouts, and other learning materials that live outside the Bookshare library. As a participating school, your educators and students get full access to the complete Bookshare Plus toolset, at no cost, in exchange for helping us measure its impact on learning.
The Beyond Books program is supported by and independently evaluated under a U.S. Department of Education Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) grant studying how accessible learning materials improve reading outcomes for students with disabilities.
Why participate
- ~50 to 150 hours saved for educators each school year. Instead of remediating documents, Bookshare Plus converts materials upstream, automatically, saving you valuable time.
- Real student impact. Math and STEM content — the hardest to make accessible — is converted from the start. Premium natural voices, reading customizations in Bookshare Reader, and an optional AI study companion improve confidence and independence.
- No cost. Full access to a paid offering, free for the 2026–2027 school year, with free access continuing for as long as sites keep participating in our learning impact evaluation study.
- Compliance handled. Meet your accessibility requirements under IDEA, Section 504, and the ADA.
- Builds on what you already know. Bookshare Plus lives inside the Bookshare experience. No new platform to learn — just a much wider set of materials to easily make accessible.
We do this with you
This is an ongoing partnership, not a hand-off. Beyond Books sites receive:
- Live training, tailored to your needs and the workflows established in your classrooms
- Ready-to-use, remote-access resources, including pre-recorded webinars, video guides, and demos
- Ongoing professional development support from the Benetech team throughout the school year
What we ask from educators
Beyond Books educators will partner with Benetech on a set of implementation and evaluation activities which will occur at specific points throughout the school year.
About 6 hours of your time across the whole school year — in exchange for the 50+ hours Bookshare Plus saves you on document remediation.
| When | What we’ll ask of you | About how long |
|---|---|---|
| Before launch | Complete a short readiness self-assessment with us, plus planning meetings | ~1 hour |
| Beginning of school year | Live training tailored to your devices and workflows, then a quick post-training survey | 1–2 hours |
| 3× during the year | Rate a sample of students on reading independence — ~3 min per student, with a few open questions on reading and assignment completion | ~1.5 hours total (for 10 students) |
| Midyear | Survey on how implementation is going and how supported you feel | ~10 min |
| Midyear | Share a short feedback survey with your students’ families | 5–10 min |
| End of school year | The same implementation/support survey again | ~10 min |
| End of school year | Revisit the readiness self-assessment with us, to reflect on the year | ~30 min |
| End of school year | Join a focus group conversation about Bookshare Plus | 30–45 min |
| End of school year | Have students answer 2–3 short questions about how they use Bookshare Plus | 5–10 min |
| Total | Spread across the entire school year | ~6 hours |
Take the next step
Ready to bring Beyond Books to your classrooms? Apply now — it takes less than 2 minutes.
Want to see more first? Watch our latest demo video at the top of the page, or send us an email at bookshareplus@benetech.org with any questions, and we’ll be in touch.
This project is supported by the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs (Award Number H327S250042). Opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the position of the U.S. Department of Education.