The main objective of Visually Impaired Children Kit for Inclusive Education (V.I.C.K.I.E.) project is to develop a technical solution for a better integration of the visually impaired pupils and students in the mainstream education.

The project enables visually impaired people to read books in digital format via a dedicated computer that translates book files into Braille or audio format.

Six partners from France, Italy and Ireland started the project. The main fruit of their work is Hélène Digital Library (France). An online library launched in January 2006 that offers more than 2,200 books mainly in French. It offers a small selection of books in English too. (See eyeway news, March 2006)

Key project partner Braillenet, an association dedicated to increasing access to documents for people with visual disability over the internet, runs the library. Any blind or partially sighted reader who owns an I.R.I.S. – a high-tech Braille-reading machine (developed by Eurobraille) can subscribe for free to the library and ‘borrow’ digital books.

One specific challenge is doing mathematics in Braille. “Very few blind pupils can do maths in Braille today,” Dominique Archambault, coordinator of the project. So the project created different programming libraries to transcribe figures and formulae in this language. Various software prototypes were developed and will be tested in autumn 2006 in France and Sweden under the follow-up Information Society Technologies project (I.S.T.) ‘Micole’.

V.I.C.K.I.E. helped set up and worked with the International Group for Universal Math Accessibility, involving universities in Europe and United States. The group is developing a programming library that works under Linux and Windows, for transcribing different forms of Braille from language to language, or country to country. The V.I.C.K.I.E. project is a European project as part of the I.S.T programme.