Betsy Beaumon Bio - 01 2015

Betsy Beaumon
President, Benetech
Betsy Beaumon is a technology executive and entrepreneur with over twenty years of
experience managing high growth organizations. At Benetech, she is leading a core
group encompassing field leadership in Benetech’s Labs, Global Literacy, Human Rights,
and Environment programs; strategy, partnership, and business planning for all of
Benetech’s new and existing initiatives and products; as well as funder development,
marketing, and communications.
As a social entrepreneur, Betsy is an authority on digital accessible materials in education
and is committed to a strategy she calls “born accessible,” imagining a future in which all
content—including mathematical formulas and other STEM (Science, Technology,
Engineering, Math) graphics—is made accessible as an integral part of the publishing
process. In 2013, sh.e testified on accessibility before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and
Pensions Committee.
Betsy joined Benetech in 2009 as general manager of the Global Literacy Program, leading it
through a tremendous expansion in both size and breadth of impact. She has grown
Bookshare, Benetech’s accessible online library, tenfold, delivering over seven million
books and transforming the lives of hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities
across the United States and internationally. In 2015 she was named Benetech’s president.
Prior to Benetech, Betsy was a senior director at BEA Systems, Inc., and managed
international e-­‐business initiatives for Cisco Systems, Inc. In 1995, she founded Social
Online Service, the first web-­‐based information and referral service for social service
organizations. As executive director of the company, she was an early supporter of web
accessibility standards. She was also a founder of TradeBeam Inc., a provider of global
trade management software services. She began her career in engineering, then moved
into product management for GTE and Lam Research Corporation.
Betsy shares her expertise in the accessible information field by serving on the board of
the DAISY (Digital Accessible Information SYstem) Consortium, which manages and
promotes the International standard for accessible books and other media, and the
Advisory Board of the National Center on Accessible Instructional Materials (NCAIM), a
collaborative group of state education officials, publishers, and other service providers.
Betsy earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from Northwestern University.