Our project is designed with the partnership of organisations from Germany, Portugal, Turkey, Italy and Sweden. We aim to do our part to remove the barriers in front of the hearing impaired individuals who want to become a cook/chef or receive vocational training in the field of cooking or who work as professionals and also would like to develop skills or improve their professional skills. The main objective of our project is to develop a fully-accessible, totally free of charge Distance Education Program for the hearing impaired individuals who face the risk of social exclusion. They will be able to use the program totally free of charge whenever and wherever they want. We firmly believe that it will serve as a good example for similar studies in the future. Thus, after complementing the project, our target group will have had a useful tool to lift the economic, social, geographical and cultural barriers they face in their vocational training. We aim for our target group to benefit from a distance learning environment designed by fully considering their needs and the obstacles related to their education.
There are various matters regarding the vocational education of the deaf individuals whose native language is the sign language. The main reasons of these matters are the teaching programs that are not suitable for them, insufficient number of teachers who know sign language and the educational materials that were not developed in sign language. Deaf individuals’ vocational education, which is already full of problems, had almost completely stopped during the pandemic. No significant work was done on the distance education of our target audience. This problem was the same in the countries of our project partners and the Europe in a broad sense. Solutions for the vocational training and distance learning of the hearing impaired have taken part in literature. In order for e-Learning systems could best meet the needs of hearing-impaired students, they should include short learning modules, the educational content should involve as little text as possible and be presented in a visual mode (such as pictures, subtitled videos, sign language videos) and provide an automatic evaluation system (Pappas et al., 2018).