Audio Haptics for Visually Impaired Information Technology

The AHVIIT-ACCESS project seeks to improve the inclusion of workers or trainees who are blind or visually impaired in vocational training programs using visual materials, by delivering these in a non visual format, which is touch and sound. The project will design, produce and test pilot learning materials, as well as create an online training program for teachers.

The need is identified by the low employment levels and specialist training facilities available for this group. Unless facilities and systems are devised and introduced now, the acceptance of e-learning as an essential feature for modernization and adaptation of training systems across the EU may continue with the substantial exclusion of this group.

The added value is in removing unemployed people from incapacity benefits, state or charitable support and allowing them full inclusion in the workforce as well as the career enhancement of workers already within the target group.

The aims and objectives are to produce three pilot VET training courses that contain a significant element of visual graphics, in the form of ‘Talking Tactiles’. Initial activities by the VET partners will be the compilation of 3 sets of lesson content materials, then by association with a specialist SME business, a series of associated tactile diagrams will be designed and produced. These tactile diagrams will then undergo a process that essentially ‘copies & pastes’ audio files into the graphics files.

By this innovative methodology, the project improves accessibility to visual graphics for the visually impaired. With the use of a specific piece of computer peripheral hardware (previously developed), as the user touches any part of the tactile overlay, associated sound files will deliver lesson content material in support of the tactile user surface navigation / interface.

“Accessibility in tactile form can greatly benefit access to learning from distance. We have experience in projects like E-Learn-VIP and ECOVIP and will work on the success of AHVIIT-ACCESS,” according to Dennis van der Heijden of Royal Visio, National Foundation for the visually Impaired and Blind (The Netherlands), partner in the project.

There are some 450 million people in the EU. Depending on the source, the % of people who are recorded as blind or visually impaired varies from around 1.5% to 4% of the population depending on age grouping. Taking a conservative 2% as a reasonable average on this basis there would be some 9 million people who at some stage of their life cycle could benefit by assistance from this project, in education, in vocational training, or for recreational purposes.

This project is about making learning materials that are visual by nature accessible to those who are partially sighted or blind. It will also offer a significant advance to the objective in that it will stem the risk of an “ever widening gap between those that have access to the new knowledge and those who do not”

Source: Visio