EATT
Equal Access to Technology Training
A project aimed at increasing computer literacy among people with vision impairments.
EATT is part funded under the
EU Leonardo da Vinci Programme
The EATT partnership involves five main partners from five EU countries.
National Council for the Blind of Ireland (Project coordinator)
Århus AMT, Denmark
Service Interrégional d'Appui aux Adultes Déficients Visuels(SIADV), France
Istituto per la Ricerca, la Formazione e la Riabilitazione (I.Ri.Fo.R), Italy
Royal National Institute for the Blind, United Kingdom
There is no doubt that older people are being left behind with regard to employability by the information technology revolution. Computer literacy is today almost as essential as ordinary literacy and numeracy skills. The majority of older blind and partially sighted people do not have access to information technology (IT). This limits their participation in social, cultural and economic life. All of the partners in this project work closely with this target group and teach IT skills, support IT users and recognise that the target group must be encouraged to engage in training to become computer literate.
The majority of blind people are aged over 35 and are unemployed. One of the necessary prerequisites to enable the majority of visually impaired people to have access to mainstream training and to employment is the ability to use computers. Barriers to the use of IT among this age group have been identified and include negative attitudes to IT, IT literacy, language and computer jargon, economic, social and cultural differences, income, self confidence, lack of knowledge, fear of the unknown and lack of training opportunities. Training programmes for older people appear to be more successful when they are tailor made for that particular audience.
The EATT project was developed by NCBI in conjunction with her partners in response to an apparent need that emerged during their work on a previous project, Employment Support Practices for vision impaired people (ESP). EATT is part funded under the EU Leonardo da Vinci programme.
The overall aim of the EATT project is to increase computer literacy among blind and partially sighted people aged over 35. It achieves this through the following actions:
In the first phase of the project, research was undertaken in the five partner countries to look at the IT needs of our target group. Why don't they use PCs? How can we encourage them to use PCs? The project also looked at the availability, accessibility, uptake and use of the IT training courses including European Computer Driving Licence (ECDL), in partner countries and researched existing initiatives concerning their accessibility for visually impaired people.
In response to identified needs the project has designed a specialist introductory package to encourage IT literacy with an aim of encouraging older blind and visually impaired people to undertake the ECDL qualification or some equivalent IT course.
The project has developed a good practice guide focused on supporting IT training service providers to ensure their courses are accessible and to actively encourage applications from visually impaired people. All information gathered on the accessibility of current IT training courses is being made available to target group.
The project has established a web site for disseminating these outputs of the project.
The project commenced on December 1, 2000 and ended on November 30, 2003.
