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Free keywords:
Knowledge Networking; e-Science
Abstract:
At present, visually impaired students are strongly discouraged to attend
university scientific studies, especially because of the lack of scientific
resources fully accessible through assistive technologies, the
difficulty to attend scientific university lectures based on explanations
employing transparencies with mathematical expressions as well as
graphical representations and the tools to work on mathematical expressions,
which are often partially usable or incomplete for advanced
subjects. Furthermore, the variety all over Europe of national braille
codes to represent mathematical expressions and the language dependence
of audio books recorded by human readers make difficult a
cross country exchange of knowledge and resources. Some universities
have been working on the improvement of assistive technologies
in science learning for many years and they have collected best experiences,
tools, accessible scientific resources and effective and efficient
methods. Unfortunately, up to now many of these best practices
and educational resources haven't got widespread all over Europe. In
order to share knowledge among universities about science accessibility
by visually impaired people and to produce guidelines and to
document best practices, the @Science thematic network was established.
It is supported for two years by the European Union eContent-
Plus Programme. It involves six founding members from five European
countries: Italy, Austria, Slovakia, Belgium and France. In the
project lifetime, collaboration actions will be undertaken so as to involve
in the thematic network other universities, software and hardware
manufacturers, publishers, associations for visually impaired
persons and students themselves. In so doing, each group will contribute
with its experience and will gain knowledge from other experiences.
Moreover, the guidelines and best practices will be the result of
a two years exchange of knowledge among experts and end users. At
first, this paper will introduce the main barriers which affect blind students
in going through scientific studies. Then, it will present the objectives
and the methodology of the @Science network.
