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Project's Objectives and Means:
The aim of the proposed Project is to improve the access to education by the use of new multimedia applications for helping persons with disability in their education and training as well as in accessing the Information Society.
Means for helping the students to follow in the best possible way the normal lessons and to find additional or alternative information on the Web will be presented to teachers and parents of children with disability.
The Project will provide information on several tools for converting
signals in more appropriate forms, like optical characters recognition
with speech synthesis for persons with visual impairment, speech recognition
for dictating texts for persons who cannot use the keyboard, voice-controlled
drawing tools for persons who cannot use the mouse, speech recognition
for automatic subtitling to communicate with the hearing impaired, adapted
access to the Internet, etc.
It will also underline as, even if starting as an answer to the needs
of students with disability, these systems may provide a service also
for any other student as well as for the elderly.
In view of disseminating the information, an ACCESS TO EDUCATION Forum
will be created on the Web. All information will be presented with choices
in several languages, with also a text description of images and tables.
This approach will follow the Trace Centre's rules for the accessibility
to the Internet for persons with visual impairment or reduced mobility.
The new generations of students are accepting the idea of working in
Europe together, using several languages. This idea will be extended
so far that, exactly at the same level on the screen where the choice
will be offered between flags of several languages, also additional
identical flags will be available for users with special needs, as for
instance a text description of images for persons with visual impairment.
The final goal is broader than the technical aspects related to the multimedia tools or to the Internet. The aim is that of a large awareness campaign, which will increase the awareness of teachers, students, families and people at home, on the problems encounter by students with special needs in the school and in the society, in everyday aspects related to education.
The Project will contribute to facilitate the access to information, offering an additional means to participate fully in the information society and improving the quality of life of persons with disability. An easier access to schools and universities and more contacts through the Internet will allow a more satisfying life and also a better choice of a work corresponding to personal capabilities and, at large, more economic productivity for the society.
Once started, this improvement of their integration and interaction in the society will have a snow ball effect and it is therefore: this initial push that is so vital. At the same time, the use of the Internet as a communication tool and its pedagogic value will be underlined, preparing the younger generations to the challenges of the third millennium.
The general idea that should be transmitted by the ACCESS TO EDUCATION Project is that, at a European scale, the problems of people with disabilities in the school and in the society are considered of the utmost importance. In this vision, the use of the Internet may provide a particular help for uniting people of different areas working together with a common objective.
The proposed European Umbrella Project will contribute to give a cross-national dimension on educational and pedagogic aspects, allowing a scale factor for the study and the development of technical aids and ensuring a large impact of the results. Also the care of multilingual aspects has to be considered at a European level, since most of the concerned Associations and of the school systems are only at a national level.
EC-JRC-ISIS can contribute by providing know-how independent of the language and support on EU Policy. Its role of impartiality could be attractive and a guarantee for those who would work in this field. The expertise of the Partners, the previous analysis of the user needs, the availability of laboratories (hardware/software) as well as of demonstrations, the experience in organising meetings and workshops, will help in achieving the goals of the Project.
The Partners will enhance collaborative work between informatics technicians and pedagogic experts. This will be based on the experience gained with four previous Projects (VOICE: voice-to-text conversion for the hearing impaired; Multimedia access to educational resources; ABI: Adaptive Brain Interface; ParlEuNet: A Student's Parliament via Educational Multimedia Learning Models and Technologies).
More particularly, the VOICE Project is an Accompanying Measure of the EC Telematics Applications Programme: VOICE - Giving a VOICE to the deaf, by developing awareness of VOICE to text recognition capabilities. The name VOICE is used in order to spread the idea that the Internet is also the VOICE, the written voice of a teacher and the written voice of friends trough the Internet, for those who can not hear the spoken voice. And the idea is even larger, in the sense that also persons with visual impairment may read the spoken Web pages via text-to-voice synthesis of the written Web pages.
Working together on the Internet
The Partners are aware of the important role of the schools in defining new pedagogic approach for the use of innovative methods of communication. They are also aware of the importance of graphical and subtitling aids in the education of young deaf students for acquiring as early as possible a good language development and for limiting his isolation in the classroom.
Several schools and H-Groups of the provincial super-intendents of public education, with great experience in disability, had no opportunity to participate so far to activities related to the use of the Internet and are looking for more information and for some successful example to follow.
The creation of a new network, where these particular needs are felt at functional level, will help in spreading the awareness of the pedagogic value of the use of Internet in the school in fields related to disability. The ACCESS TO EDUCATION Project might be a particularly motivating reason for starting new applications and to spread the use of the Internet.
When a student or a teacher is on the Internet, he or she may feel uncertain about the procedure to follow and may not find a reference point, so interesting as to reconnect a second time later on. In that case, the Web pages of the Project, the e-mail addresses of some correspondents and all the other tools here proposed, may constitute a valid starting point to continue the connection and find new paths to follow.
Cybergirls and Education of Parents
The invitation to present an application for Netd@ys Europe 99 encourages the participation of cybergirls and underlines the concept: pupils teach their parents. These ideas perfectly fit in the proposed Project. In fact, many students with hearing impairment attend Arts Schools, since they often have good skills in activities related to images and not to sounds. These schools are attended by a large number of girls, who in some case are well experienced in the use of the Internet for researches and home-works. Also in some Scientific Schools there are groups of cybergirls particularly active.
In most of the Italian schools the remedial teachers for helping in the integration of students with disability are female. The same is true for re-education therapists for the hearing impaired and for active staff in several Associations. In the families with children with disabilities, the mothers have to carry heavy responsibilities and might get useful information from the Web. Many cybergirls have already started to help other persons who need particular care in accessing the Web and look forward to enlarging this activity.
Visibility in the Netd@ys Week
In order to present to a larger public the information on the above-mentioned systems, different initiatives will be carried out during the Netd@ys week.
The ACCESS TO EDUCATION Help Desk, created specifically in view of this week, will be announced. Its use will be encouraged for receiving on line help on multimedia applications and on the use of the Internet.
Several presentations of multimedia tools will be organised. A voice-to-text prototype will be used for demonstrating the on-line subtitling of school lessons for the benefit of deaf students and of language lessons for the benefit of any student. At the same time the system produces a first draft of the text of lesson.
The presentations will be held at the schools already
using the prototype and will be organised as an open doors week
addressed to visiting teachers and students from other schools. A videoconference
will connect among them these schools and other schools looking for
information on the system and its use. Part of the videoconference will
be broadcast during television programmes for schools.
The discussion will be extended to the subtitling of television programmes,
a very powerful help for deaf people, particularly for the language
learning and training for deaf children. The importance of the educational
aspect lies in the fact that subtitles are for a deaf child one of the
most powerful learning tools of any language, just as a hearing child
would learn from things it heard.
Should they wish to do so, the officials of DG-XXII in charge of Netd@ys will participate via videoconference to the television transmission, from the EC offices in Brussels.
A pamphlet on school and disability will be prepared and distributed during the presentations to people attending them directly, while those attending trough videoconference or television transmissions will be informed of the Internet address of the ACCESS TO EDUCATION Forum, where the same documentation will be available in an appropriate format.
A Workshop will be organised on multimedia applications, intended as training course for teachers, with the agreement and the collaboration of the provincial super-intendents of public education.
A world wide Internet search will be organised, with
the objective of finding other similar applications in the world and
of getting in touch with schools concerned with problems related to
disability.
This will help in: facilitating the starting of new contacts and encouraging
the discussion of the technical and pedagogic aspects; accessing the
Help Desk and stimulating the use of the Chat Line for
exchanging chatting and informal messages; this aspect is particularly
important for encouraging the deaf to communicate with their hearing
friends and will bring the other students to ask for the collaboration
of their friends with disability in order to get more information for
the search.
All the European television broadcasters are being invited to attend an international conference organised by RAI Italian television in collaboration with EC-JRC-ISIS next June in Bologna on television and disability. Several of them are confirming their participation and will probably continue the collaboration, more particularly in the Netd@ys week.
EC-JRC-ISIS normal contacts with television and radio broadcasters, newspapers and reviews will help in spreading the information. The contacts with schools and Associations of persons with disability, part of which are listed in the next pages, will be extended to other countries.