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. This voluntary standard will guide the production and electronic distribution of flexible digital instructional materials, such as textbooks, so that they can be more easily converted to Braille, text-to-speech, and other accessible formats.
The full report of the National File Format technical panel, including the technical specifications for the NIMAS, is available at
http://nimas.cast.org/about/report/index.html
Please visit the NIMAS website at http://nimas.cast.org to follow the ongoing development of the NIMAS specification and progress achieved through technical assistance.