Why did APH establish the National Instructional Materials Access Center?
The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEA 2004) required states to address the critical difficulty in obtaining accessible textbooks for students with disabilities by adopting a new file format, the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS). This same legislation offered a means to assist states in this responsibility by establishing a national repository to receive and store these files and make them available to states. This repository is the National Instructional Materials Access Center (NIMAC), and was established at the American Printing House for the Blind, Inc. (APH) with support from the U.S. Department of Education.
