The IMC produces and acquires educational materials in alternative formats for eligible students who are unable to access standard print throughout the State of Iowa.
As an Authorized Media Producer (AMP) in Iowa for braille, large print, audio and electronic text formats, the IMC has resources to provide timely, quality, and cost-effective materials to students and schools.
Braille
The Instructional Materials Center (IMC) is committed to providing accessible educational materials to students who need alternative formats. Braille is one of the alternative formats that the IMC provides. The IMC Team has developed a series of short videos explaining how braille materials are created, the guidelines followed to produced materials and what educators can do to ensure students receive the best high-quality braille for students when they need it.
When a student needs braille for class assignments, worksheets, textbooks, workbooks, assessments and more:
- The IMC Team checks to see if the library has the materials available in the library collection.
- If it is available, the materials are checked out to the student and sent for the student to use.
- If it is not already available in the library, the IMC team finds the materials from another source to put into braille.
Braille Guidelines
Guideline Resources:
- Literary Braille Transcribing | National Federation of the Blind
- Code Books and Guidelines
- Unified English Braille (UEB)
- Braille Formats 2016
- Nemeth Code
- Early Learning Materials
- Foreign Language
- Music Braille
- Tactile Graphics
Videos:
- Planning Braille Transcription Projects Video
- Creating Tactiles Video
- Braille Inside Tactiles Video
- Making Tactile Maps Video
Large Print
The IMC’s aim is to increase the size of the original text as much as reasonably possible, while retaining the quality of the page. Our standard is 20 point font.
Large Print books are a direct reproduction of the print copies (textbooks, worksheets and other items) we receive, so we need the print copy to be of high quality for transcription.
Font sizes can only be enlarged about 1-2 sizes from their original font size. For example, if the original material is in 12 point font, the maximum size will be between 14 – 18 point font.
Some projects will need to be transcribed in a split page format.
Audio and Electronic Braille
BARD (Braille and Audio Reading Download)
BARD is a collection of over 80,000 audio books and magazines and braille materials available for eligible readers to download. The collection is added to daily. The recent contracts with commercial audio book producers for book copies will be in addition to the 2,000 titles produced each year by the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled.
Bookshare® is the world’s largest accessible online library for people with print disabilities. How can you read Bookshare® books?
- Listen to books with high quality text-to-speech voices
- Hear and see highlighted words on screen
- Read with digital braille or enlarged fonts
- Create physical braille or large print
- Read directly from your Internet browse
Learning Ally creates human-narrated audio textbooks, literature and education solutions for students with print and learning disabilities including blindness and dyslexia.