Links to Partners

  

RNC European Projects links

ECO-VIP

Training course for e-learning coaches and ICT trainers working with visually impaired learners.

This project is now complete

Funding: EU Leonardo Fund.

Rationale: The development of a training course for eLearning coaches and ICT trainers which qualified participants to educate blind and partially sighted learners via e-learning.

Outcomes :

• Creation of a virtual platform for European network of e-learning coaches working with people who are blind or partially sighted.
• Final on-line exam.
• Development and evaluation of pilot course.

European Partners :

• The Royal National College for the Blind - Hereford, UK
• FISAF - France
• Instituut Monteclair - France
• VISIO - The Netherlands
• SOSW - Poland
• ARLA - Finland

Lead Partner on Project: BFW - Duren, Germany

Time Scale:

Start date - November 2006
Completion date - October 2008

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E-YES

The development of new tools for creating and managing e-learning programmes, that would be fully accessible to visually impaired people.

This project is now complete.

Funding: EU Leonardo Fund.

Outcomes:

The development of 2 tools designed for use by visually impaired people:

1. E-Yes platform - software system for administering and providing on-line courses. Monitoring and tracking of all activities.
2. Creation of virtual study groups/classrooms.
3. E-Yes course builder - authoring tool which produced accessible materials.

European Partners:

• The Royal National College for the Blind - UK
• Multimedia Campus, Srl - Italy
• Berufsforderungswerk Duren - Germany
• Deutscher Blinden und Sehbehindertenverband e.V. - Germany
• Landesinitiative Neue Kommunikationswege - Germany
• Mecklenburg Vorpommen e.V.
• Rehabilitation for the Blind Foundation - Bulgaria
• Specjainy Osrode Szkoino-Wychowawczydia - Poland
• Dzieci Niewidomych I Slabowidzacych
• Unione Itailiana Ciechi - Italy

Lead Partner on Project: Universita di Pavia - Italy

Time Scale:

Start date - November 2006
Completion date - October 2008

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RoboBraille

RoboBraille is an email based translation service capable of translating email attachments to and from contracted braille and to synthetic speech.

Now complete, the project won the Social Inclusion Project Catogory at the British Computer Society awards in 2007, and the service has continued to change the way many people with a visual impairment access written texts.

Funding: e-Ten.

Objectives:

• The project analysed the market possibilities for the RoboBraille service in the 6 partner countries.
• Partners ran pilot tests on the RoboBraille service with some 900 users from the 5 partner countries.
• A business plan/development report was prepared on the conditions for initial deployment of the service, and thereby enable and encourage initial deployment of the service.

Outcomes: The development of RoboBraille - an email based translation service capable of translating email attachments to and from contracted braille and to synthetic speech, allowing users to:

• Translate documents into contracted braille.
• Translate documents into speech.
• Translate text into visual braille.
• Convert text documents between different character sets.
• Convert braille documents to specific braille character sets.
• Partition documents into smaller parts.

Users are able to submit documents (e.g., text files, Word documents, HTML pages) as email attachments. The translated results are then returned to the user via email, typically within a matter of minutes.

European Partners involved in Robobraille:

• The Royal National College for the Blind - Hereford, UK
• Associazone Nazionale Subvedenti - Italy
• National Council for the Blind of Ireland - Dublin, Ireland
• National Association of Housing for the Visually Impaired - Ireland
• POT - Cyprus
• CIDEF - Portugal

Lead Partner on Project : Organisation Synscenter Refsnaes - Denmark

Time Scale:

Start date - October 2006
Completion Date - June 2008

Project website: www.robobraille.org

These projects were funded with support from the European Commission.

This web page reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.