History of NIMAS
In 2002, the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) at the U.S. Department of Education funded the National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum (NCAC) at CAST to "establish technical specifications for a voluntary National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS)."1 The purpose of the NIMAS is to "facilitate the provision of accessible, alternate-format versions of print textbooks to pre-K–12 students with disabilities."2 In order to accomplish this goal, the National File Format (NFF) Technical Panel was formed. During a series of public meetings, the Panel brought together a comprehensive group of representatives of the K–12 educational community, in its broader sense, made up of "educators, publishers, technology specialists, and advocacy groups"; as well as interested members of the public such as parents and others, specifically in order to develop the NIMAS through an inclusive and a consensus-building process.3 For example, emphasis was placed on including members from both general and special education communities.
As a result of this effort, the Panel achieved a general and a specific set of recommendations for the creation of accessible instructional materials with an unprecedented level of consensus among its representative groups. Essentially, NIMAS is "a standard of guidelines for the production of digital source files for print-based materials based on XML and the DAISY Consortium's ANSI/NISO 239.86 file format standard, the purpose of which is to enable publishers and others to provide standardized source files of their content from which a variety of outputs can be produced."4
The practical component of the NIMAS is its Baseline Element Set made up of XML elements derived from the DAISY standard and the instructions and best practices guidelines provided in the technical specifications and elsewhere on the NIMAS web site (see below). Preparers of NIMAS-conformant files are strongly encouraged to use full DAISY mark-up whenever possible.
NIMAS Center
This is the official site of the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS). The NIMAS' technical specification describes what the NIMAS is and how it is and will be implemented. Vital for creating NIMAS-conformant files is the listing of the Standard's Baseline Element Set.
NIMAS Technical Standard
In June of 2005, the U.S. Department of Education published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for IDEA 2004 in the Federal Register that included the NIMAS. During the comment period that ensued, the NIMAS Technical Committee took the opportunity to recommend that the current Standard be updated to reflect the more current DAISY/NISO Z39.86 2005 specification. Changes were minimal but did include several corrections and additions. While it is expected that these recommendations will be accepted, changes to the NIMAS cannot be considered official or final until the full specification (with or without recommended changes) is posted by the U.S. Department of Education.
NIMAS Exemplars
These NIMAS exemplars are samples available for download and include basic required files as well as supplementary materials. Examine a NIMAS XML file to see its structure and mark-up first-hand.
1 - _____. National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard Report, Version 1.0. (2004.) CAST, Inc., Wakefield, MA., p. 2.
4 - Jackson, R. Curriculum Access for Students with Low-Incidence Disabilities: The Promise of Universal Design for Learning. (2005.) NCAC, Wakefield, MA., p. 117.