AccessibleMediaCenter.com

The TechAdapt Accessible Media Center (TAMC)

This is the home of the TechAdapt Accessible Media Center (TAMC), a software tool that enables the conversion of National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard (NIMAS) and Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) file sets into various types of accessible media.

About the TechAdapt Accessible Media Center

TAMC was born out of a need to provide easy and effective conversion options for NIMAS and DAISY file sets. It is intended to allow state and local educational agencies, parents, teachers, and others with access to NIMAS and DAISY file sets with the ability to convert books into consumer-ready formats that do not require the use of additional software or hardware players.

Currently, TAMC can produce two different file types from NIMAS and DAISY input:

In the future, TAMC will be extended to allow the production of other media formats, such as audio and braille. Requests from our clients for other functionality are always welcome.

Samples of the TAMC HTML output using the CAST NIMAS Exemplars can be found in our Samples section.

Why You Should Use TAMC

We believe that TAMC is a viable option for many school districts, educational service centers (ESCs), and other education professionals who want to produce accessible media from NIMAS and DAISY files. Here's why:

How It Works

TAMC uses a combination of standardized technologies, open-source tools and commercial software. It presents a clean, simple HTML-based interface which is accessible by many screen reader programs. Conversions to any of the supported formats require only three steps: specify your input and output locations, indicate which options you'd like used by the conversion process, and perform the conversion. Conversions take only a few minutes.

You can control the output by specifying a number of different options:

In addition to the above, you can use one of our pre-built editing scripts to solve common problems with NIMAS and DAISY files. You can develop your own editing scripts for use with TAMC, or you can have TechAdapt or another service provider develop them for you using the widely-used XSLT language.

For HTML, you can also specify:

Licensing and Support

The TechAdapt Accessible Media Center software is available free of charge to state and local educational agencies, institutions of higher education, and other education professionals. Other interested parties should contact Chris von See at chris@techadapt.com to inquire. Source code is not currently available, but if you have enhancements you'd like to see or if you are interested in participating in the development of TAMC please contact us.

Currently only email support is available, and support is free of charge. We will make every effort to respond to email support requests as quickly as possible. If you are considering a large deployment of TAMC or would like to make arrangements for telephone support, please contact us at support@accessiblemediacenter.techadapt.com.

Downloading and Using the TechAdapt Accessible Media Center

You can download the TAMC software by using this link. If you have any problems downloading the software, please contact support@accessiblemediacenter.com

Most of the capabilities of TAMC are available on all of the major platforms, including Microsoft Windows XP, Mac OS X and many Linux systems. A Java Runtime Library (JRE) version 1.5 or later is required; for your convenience, download packages are available which include the JRE so that it need not be downloaded and installed separately. TAMC has not yet been tested with Windows Vista, although we do not anticipate problems.

The only known TAMC functional restriction is that RTF generation support is currently available only on Microsoft Windows platforms. If you require the ability to create RTF from NIMAS or DAISY file sets or if you have a need to create other accessible media from NIMAS or DAISY input, please contact the TAMC support staff at support@accessiblemediacenter.techadapt.com.

Feedback

Your feedback is important! If you would like to see new or different features in TAMC, would like to convert NIMAS and DAISY files to other formats, or just want to tell us how you like (or dislike) TAMC, please contact us at feedback@accessiblemediacenter.techadapt.com

©2008 TechAdapt, Inc.