Projects

7.    Accessibility of persons with disabilities to ICT

Believing that persons with disabilities must have the same access to ICT as everyone else, accessibility of handicapped persons to ICT gains a specific attention in the information society.

Accessibility to ICT not only permits to persons with disabilities to master and use these news technologies, but also increases their skills and competencies, and therefore, opportunities of employment.

In, this context, the Research Unit of TIC supports and contributes to these efforts by launching several research projects in order to design tools and dedicated environments. Two main projects are already kicked-off:

1- Create a barrier-free learning environment for students with disabilities: our aim is to transcend physical disabilities and physical distance with distance learning technology. Our project consists in developing dedicated tools in order to give handicapped users the opportunity to access education using Internet and new technologies just like any other students. We focused in first works on visual
impairment.

2- Develop tools for person with problems of deaf/hard-of-hearing to facilitate web access. This tool uses virtual person and XML based technology to translate automatically written text to the language of signs.

Our purpose here is to present our current projects and to launch a call for collaboration and support to these works. We believe that only federation of efforts can leads to attempt noble goals.

WebSign: a tool for communication with Deaf people.

Projects