Presentation

Description

The Louis Braille Secondary School for the Visually Impaired in Sofia is a special state school. Blind and visually impaired children from Sofia and the whole country aged 5 to 19 live and study there.Since 2009, a Braille printing house has been established at the school, financed mainly by the Ministry of Education and Science and supported by non-governmental organizations. The printing house has modern equipment for Braille printing and for the production of educational materials in enlarged font. Publishes textbooks, teaching aids and relief images for the needs of school students and those who are integrated in general education schools

Digital activity

Web-accessibility

Good practice targeted

Accessibility

To go further

https://suunz.org

Good practice

The idea for the Web Accessibility Handbook (hereinafter referred to as the Handbook) was developed by a broad interdisciplinary team that included key project experts and representatives of the Horizons Foundation with competence in information technology (IT) for the people with visual impairments.
The manual is in electronic format and is intended for site developers, administrators of existing sites, contractors for site development and more. An Internet application has been developed for the manual - a questionnaire (checklist), containing graded questions for assessing the accessibility of sites.The questionnaire is intended for end users and for anyone who wants to quickly and easily check whether a site is accessible to users with visual impairments.
People with disabilities must be able to seek, receive and share information and use new technologies, on an equal footing with other members of society, in order to increase their independence in all areas of life.

Starting date of the good practice

2017

Time to implement the good practice

12 months

Tools/partners/suppliers of the good practice

Foundation Horizons

Mrs. Elka Belkapova, director of a school for visually impaired children, Sofia

What are the benefits of the project ?

As educators and as teachers, every day we strive to be useful to our students- visually impaired children, who need our not only theoretical but also practical advice. The fact that these children are visually impaired does not make them less technological, less curious or less uninterested in the Internet.The project helped us a lot in telling the children what an accessible site is, why it is important for them to use accessible sites and what makes the sites accessible to the visually impaired.The handbook is extremely useful for both teachers and students, in connection with this preparation and self-preparation not only in school but also outside it, it is important for their social inclusion.

What were the constraints faced by the company ?

Our challenge was to show and tell the children the information from the project in a language accessible to them, so that they can easily perceive and make sense of it,and most of all, what part of the handbook should be presented, how and what should be presented to the students.

Which advice would give to another company ?

This is a useful handbook for all resource centers that work with children and people with visual impairments, it can also be used in private companies that work with people with visual impairments.

What are the next steps?

Some of the older children showed a strong curiosity to volunteer and search for and talk about accessible sites that are related to the interests of teenagers. In this way, they will not only help themselves but also their peers to discover and use such sites.