In 1985, CILS received a grant of $70,000 from the provincial government to serve perceptually-disabled college students. At that time, CILS’ main activity was to produce books-on-tape for perceptually-disabled BC college students. In the same year, CILS served 72 students by producing 22 books, and buying or borrowing others when available.

Over the next decade demand for CILS service grew steadily, and by 1995 CILS served 226 BC college students by producing 145 titles. In the same year the province of BC provided CILS with an annual budget of $330,000.

By 1998, personal computer use was becoming increasingly wide spread, and in order to take advantage of emergent technology such as screen magnification and text-to-speech, CILS began producing e-text.

In 2002, CILS again innovated by establishing a DAISY production process.

In 2004, demand for CILS services rose sharply. This is indicated by an increased number of individuals registering for CILS services, and by the number of alternate format materials produced by CILS.

This transition was facilitated by the addition of professional librarians to the CILS team, who ultimately established modern business workflows. These workflows included a tracking database, a central server on which to store the growing CILS collection, and metadata and cataloguing practices to facilitate resource sharing and discoverability. Additionally, other formats were added to CILS offerings, such as MP3, PDF, Kurzweil and ePub formats.

In 2013, CILS began sending completed materials through an online delivery system, getting files to clients almost immediately upon completion rather having to wait for mail time.

In 2014, after many months of consultations and work and with The Ministry’s approval, CILS was officially renamed to CAPER-BC.

Over the years CAPER-BC has won several awards including the British Columbia Library Association’s (BCLA) Merit Award in 1985/86 and the CNIB’s Dr. Dayton M. Forman Memorial Award in 2007. Ryan Vernon and Stephen Blaeser won the BCLA’s Academic Librarians in Public Service Award in 2009.