As we know, accessibility is an important part of the modern and fully fledged life of people with a visual impairment. Nowadays, the legal conditions have been created in Slovakia under which accessibility can become a reality in the country. The problem arises, however, when we include the human factor into the process. The employees of various client centres, even those directly responsible for individual accessibility areas, can’t react properly or provide people with visual impairment with adequate information or adapt the environment to be the most accessible and user-friendly.
In September 2019, the Slovak Blind and Partially Sighted Union started an international project titled From Education to Inclusion (EDI) funded by the Erasmus+ Programme. Our partners are FUNKA from Sweden and Teiresiás from the Czech Republic. The project will last until February 2022.
The goal of the project is to contribute to eliminating the barriers by creating training modules for specific target groups. These are employees of Slovak municipalities in positions directly working with clients, managers of the built environment within the municipality or those spreading information within the municipality, and leaders with a visual impairment.
We aim to pilot the training modules created and, as a result, to raise the social inclusion of blind and partially sighted people in society. Also, after finishing the project, our ambition is to offer our training to Slovak municipalities and thus raise awareness on visual impairment and accessibility within the Slovak public administration bodies.