WHITE (EU Leonardo da Vinci program)
Web For Handicap Integrated Training Environment (White) is an European funded project aiming to improve the educational/training systems to include people with physical disabilities (particularly visually impaired, people with disabilities about upper limbs and general movement). This proposal in the vocational training field concurs with other European Commettee initiatives (2003 has been named "people with disabilities European year") inviting Communitarian Countries to promote actions for social integration of disadvantaged people, like people with disabilities, by means of ICT, especially Internet. This project contains several actions for involving most of training agents (both public and private) in building a systemic logic (at territorial level) for a vocational training really including people with disabilities; for this reason some representative of trade associations, voluntary services and health local authorities are going to join in WHITE.
The general proposal will aim:
- to define practices to introduce in the quality management of educational/training agencies making physical disabled an “ordinary” target of users;
- to design models Web for handicap based for all level teachers and trainers (vocational training, university, secondary school);
- to concur to remove professional segregation of physical disabled;
- to set up a permanent informative system (on Internet) including project results and other information about facilities in vocational training for people with disabilities.
The project will be based on the following macro-activities and relevant products:
- a preliminary international research about the best suited practices for the integration of people with physical disabilities in vocational training;
- a research about the state of the art for Web accessibility from people with physical disabilities in partner countries;
- realization of a design model for all levels training materials (vocational training, university, school) for P.C. and Internet (building of handicap adaptive Web pages);
- realization of software interfaces allowing people with disabilities to use available peripheral devices for P.C. (optical devices, vocal synthesis, tranducers of motion, …);
- design and realization of procedures to be included into quality management of educational/training agencies;
- designing of a vocational training curriculum for a productive sector (sound and multimedia), as an example of distance learning and Web technologies for people with disabilities;
- designing and realization of training modules according to defined curriculum;
- designing of a learning efficiency evaluation tool for realized training products;
- testing of the vocational training model;
- definition of a way to inform potential users of vocational training model;
- Realization of diffusion activities during the project ; planning of diffusion activities at the end of the project.
The last activity is over cross to entire project and will be a cyclic diffusion process regarding intermediary and final results by models to be adopted from all partners, including a dynamic evaluation model about quality and effectiveness of dissemination. Dissemination will mean the transfer of results and practices into other sectors where the training for people with physical disability is expected, such as working environments.