http://infomerciais.blogspot.com

When we proposed to make available to blind workers Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers online courses, we had not many connections to blind people. Only the beautiful story of a 6 years old boy from Anjou who was taken care of by Institut Monteclair during his studies all the way until he reached the "Diplôme d'ingénieur en informatique du CNAM". He is now a successful engineer at IBM headquarters in Paris. Because we tested with "Baisser les Barrières" the facility to digitize online courses then widspread them among blind students, we considered time had come to propose to the EEC to fund a whole project of digitization of online resources. This would allow any blind students to become software engineers. Because our first attempt was rejected by the EEC (for some good reasons we don't know), people around us said: "don't loose your time; you will never succeed in convincing the EEC in funding your project".
Instead of stopping our efforts we decided to create a local group of idealists. People who believe that "call for proposals" from the EEC are not only made for traveling and grasping money whatever the subject.
We made a list of issues for which we felt ready to fight for. Issues related to social promotion, well-being improvement, etc. We decided to build a "B plan" for each answer we would send to a "call for proposal". This "B plan" should feasible without extra money. It should depend on our human convictions and capabilities, instead of political decisions and voted budgets. It should be dependant only on our own forces and our own personal calendars, not the official calendar of "call for proposals" from the EEC.
That way, we hope we will work more happily, with the conviction that our aim will be attained whateverd the EEC decision will be.
Because this is my first contribution to this blog I am not sure it corresponds to the objectives. At least, it is an attempt to describe how we can all build a better Europe independantly from an administrative calendar of events and budget decisions...

Hi again Per and many thanks for your prompt and informative response. The issue of funding and the role of volunteers you referred to is a contant theme. AT the last epractice workshop on 'digital literacy' in Barcelona 2 weeks ago the role of volunteers in bridging the funding gap was discussed in some detail. Re the September workshop your presence, accompanied or not by other colleagues, would make a welcome and valuable contribution to the discussions and results. If its OK with you I will send the draft agenda in the next few days. The wiki project you are working on is also really interesting and we would value your insights and experiences on how it has been working and the plans for the future. Perhaps it would be useful if I gave you my contadt details so we could also communicate outside the epractcie blog. emails are: j.cullen@tavinstitute.org and jcullen@arcola-research.co.uk
Hope to hear from you and hopefully meet soon
Joe

Hi Per
I have been following your blog and would like to draw your attention to two things which may be of interest. First, epractice is organising with the European Commisison a workshop in Brussels on 25th September. This is devoted to discussing how to make ICTs more accessible for people who for a number of reasons, including visual problems, are not currently well served. I am responsible for setting the eganda for this workshop and inviting speakers. I wondered firstly whether you could help by letting me know what kinds of issues you think would merit discussion at the workshop and secondly whether you would welcome a chance to make a presentation based on your own experiences.
Secondly I was very interetsed to read about the work you are doing on the German wikipedia. I am invovled in another project, for the INstitute for Prospective Technological Studies, in Seville, on the use of 'Web 2.0' like Wiki for learning and inclusion. We are doing some case studies of examples and I wondered if you could give me some information on the initiative you are working on.
Hope to hear from you
Best wishes
Joe Cullen

Hi Joe,
thank you for your feedback and interest. I would really like to join the workshop in Brussels. Unfortunately, i am not an eloquent speaker and publicly speaking in English will surely not make it better. Your event seems to be too important for an eventually incomprehensible speaker like me. On the other hand, some of my major interests are of particular relevance to the intended workshop and they should be discussed at this event if possible. Maybe I can find one German/English speaking person for collaboration and a little bit assistance. This would make my potential participation more productive for all. I can certainly suggest some interesting/important topics (see my dream list) but this depends on the intended agenda. What is the goal of the workshop? Maybe i could also propose a better speaker.

I am interested in your work on collaborative platforms and especially in the possibilities of Mediawiki wikis. The accessibility project at the German language Wikipedia was started one year ago and is called BIENE. The first goal is to find out exactly which groups of users have which problems while using Wikipedia. At the moment, I am the only active blind user at de.Wikipedia and so my job was and is to imform about the needs of blind screen reader users. Therefore I am testing, answering questions, making suggestions and for example, have written a short manual for seeing Wikipedians about how to evaluate the accessibility and usability of Wiki pages with a demo of a screen reader software. This shall make it easier for them to understand the problems of blind users. Additional to improvements for the Mediawiki user interface, I would like to translate the German help page for blind users, first into English and after that I will try to find translators for other languages. A huge problem for the whole accessibility project is that there are only volunteers who are contributing in their leisure time but nearly all desirable solutions would need the work of experienced Mediawiki programmers. Unfortunately, these few qualified volunteers already have lots of things to do and so there is no time for accessibility research or usability improvements. This was the reason for my posting "Making Wikipedia fully accessible for all". A sponsorship for a qualified Mediawiki developer would be a solution. I already have heard of interested professionals and the Wikimedia Foundation and the European chapters will surely appreciate such an accessibility sponsoring. I don't know if I have answered your question. Please let me know if you want to read more.
Best regards, Per Busch