Today, around 70% (source: EBU) of blind students in Europe are educated in inclusive classrooms. This often means they are the only ones in the class unable to work with visual learning materials. As a result, not only is their learning success at risk, but teachers and classmates also face significant challenges. To improve learning opportunities for blind students, promote inclusive classroom learning, and ease the burden on teachers, access to graphical learning materials must be ensured. Therefore, the most important mathematical graphics for each grade level are identified and adapted to the specific needs of blind and severely visually impaired learners. The goal is for blind students to work independently with these materials, deepen their knowledge, and learn effectively. To guarantee the quality of the 1,250 learning graphics, they are designed by special education experts in visual impairment and tested with blind and visually impaired students. In this way, the project makes a vital contribution to improving the educational opportunities of blind and severely visually impaired learners.
Blind and severely visually impaired students today have access to only a fraction of the graphical learning materials available to their sighted peers. While sighted students encounter around 25,000 learning graphics throughout their school years, blind students can only access a small portion of them. In mathematics, graphical learning materials are omnipresent. They are indispensable not only in geometry and curve theory but across the subject as a whole. If blind students cannot access these materials, or only in a very limited way, it has a major impact on their learning success. Since mathematics is such a central subject, the project’s goal is to eliminate the shortage of suitable learning materials. To achieve this, approximately 100 of the most important learning graphics per grade level will be identified and adapted to the specific needs of blind and severely visually impaired learners. These will then be made available free of charge for download to teachers and students worldwide. In this way, the learning opportunities of blind and severely visually impaired students in the crucial subject of mathematics will be sustainably improved worldwide.