National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS)
In a landmark announcement for students with sensory and other print disabilities, the U.S. Department of Education endorsed the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS), version 1.0 on July 27th, 2004. On behalf of Secretary Paige, Deputy Secretary of Education Gene Hickok discussed the new standard at an event commemorating the 14th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The event was co-sponsored by the Departments of Commerce and Education in Washington, D.C. The voluntary standard will guide the production and electronic distribution of flexible digital instructional materials such as textbooks so they can be more easily converted to Braille, text-to-speech, and other accessible formats.
All students with print disabilities experience the same barrier—inaccessible materials—when core curriculum textbooks presented in print are the primary learning resource. Students who cannot see the words on a page, cannot hold a book or turn its pages, cannot decode the text or cannot comprehend the syntax that supports the written word may each experience different challenges, and they may each require different supports to extract meaning from information that is "book bound"—but the barrier for each is the same.
The Secretary of Education has authorized OSEP, The Office of Special Education Programs, to issue a supplement to the National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum led by CAST, to convene an expert panel to establish a voluntary national standard for accessible digital instructional materials for students with disabilities. gh was proud to participate in this panel and was instrumental in the authoring of the technical specification for the NFF (later renamed NIMAS) standard. This new standard basically mandates that all K-12 textbooks be produced by publishers in NIMAS format in addition to the traditional print format.
For more information on NIMAS, please visit our NIMAS Conversion Section or visit NIMAS at CAST.