Digital technologies have an amazing potential in education and huge efforts and interest are being put into empowering teachers for better learning outcomes. The European Commission is accordingly strongly supporting, through policies and funding, digital learning in the European Education System. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically exemplified the necessity of broadly accessible online educational resources.Unfortunately, disabled students are often left apart from this mainstream of research and innovation in Educational Technologies because the platforms and tools are not designed taking this group of users into account. As a result, students with disabilities suffer from a double disadvantage: not only cannot they benefit from the new teaching methodologies, but they cannot even access more traditional textbook-style digital learning material to support their self-studying. The overall goal of this project’s proposal is to significantly contribute to increase the number of online open educational resources accessible for disabled students, with an emphasis on visually impaired. It therefore stands up for a more inclusive e-learning.By developing further the results of the Erasmus Plus KA201 project INDIe, 2018-1-ES01-KA201-050924, http://indieproject.eu, an authoring tool will be delivered which implements a layer of generation of accessible content. It will therefore allow teachers and educators to easily produce rich online learning units which are accessible to students with visual impairment and possibly additional disabilities.Moreover, a number of accessible learning units on a range of topics and educational levels will be produced and published to the INDIeOpen repository of Open Educational Resources. These will be open to use, share, modify by any person interested. An online course on inclusive education for the professional development of teachers, staff or any person interested in the education of students with disabilities, will also be made available on INDIeOpen. Finally, the authoring tool INDIeAuthor itself will be adapted for a seamless experience for authors with visual impairment, who will be empowered to create their own online digital content.To achieve these goals, a consortium was built in a complementary perspective with partners with different profiles: a higher education institution with a strong technological know-how; organisations - a charity and specialised schools - with expertise and decades of experience in the education of students with visual impairment and additional disabilities; mainstream high schools with visually impaired students; a regional authority for education which in charge of attending students with educational needs in the Region of Murcia, and finally, a Greek association of teachers who share the passion to promote STEM subjects in education.The project aims to make a difference to the education of learners with disabilities allowing them to fully participate into digital learning, and helping them overcome some of the difficulties they have in education. This will be primarily achieved within the partnership but also on a regional, national and international level, taking advantage of multiplier events and of the networks our partners belong to. Likewise, we desire to improve awareness and training regarding inclusive education in the mainstream partner schools, and more generally in all schools we have contact with, on a regional, national and international level.All generated units along the project are published in INDIeOpen under a Creative Commons License, which means that any student in the world can use the units for his or her self-study, and any teacher in the world can link it from their Learning Management System as an Open Educational Resource. Our desire is to achieve a level of dissemination which would allow many students and teachers to be aware of these OER, contributing to a global education community.Finally, all the code of the intellectual outputs will be available in GitHub. It is our ambition that, as the community of authors and users grow, more programmers join the community and contribute to the code by sending pull requests and programming new modules and functionalities.Regarding the methodology, because of its strong technological component, the workflow will basically follow the Agile paradigm, so that functionalities are progressively delivered and tested, and the feedback of users and beta-testers are incorporated in the development process. The testing activities will therefore be organised by the partners in a systematic manner, and the users’ feedback be collected to guide further development.

The background of this project is that several professionals were working together on an EU project and identified the need for development of training and materials of educators of children with cerebral visual impairment. Since then the project idea has developed and the group became bigger because it's necessary to connect health care and education professionals together to address this area of need. Therefore the group behind this project comes from a cross sector of professionals that are all connected to the vision field in some way. The objectives of this project are to produce training and teaching materials for teachers, a scanning tool and guidelines for health care and educational professionals. The project group has seen that this kind of training, tools and guidelines are lacking in the European environment of vision. The number of project partners are seven and the profile of them are various. The National Institute for the Blind is experienced in participating in projects nationally and internationally and will be responsible for leading the project. Positive Eye is a training company that will be responsible for developing the seminars (where we train the teacher advisor) it is to be held for professionals across Europe and the partnership organizations. The Royal Blind School - Edinburgh . will be used as a pilot school to try out the resources. This allows the products developed by the partnership to be tried and tested with the teachers and the students with cerebral visual impairment. SPSM - the National Agency for Special Needs Education and Schools is a Research Centre for children with vision loss due to brain damage. SPSM conducts special needs vision assessments and educational advice. They will be responsible for gathering information for the project and pilot the screening and guidelines and other resources that will be put forward. The University of LEUVEN is to be involved in the project and will be represented by Prof Dr Els Ortibus. Dr. Els Ortibus who is a leading specialist in CVI within Europe and will be responsible for creating a screening tool for cerebral visual impairment. ChildVision, Dublin, is Ireland’s National Education Centre for Blind and Visually Impaired children and young people. ChildVision will fulfil the internal moderation function, ensuring through specific methodological means that the ongoing evaluation ensures the project remains on target, in terms of generating an end result with the potential to improve teaching strategies and benefit learners. The Icelandic Diagnostic Center is known for their extensive knowledge of children with disabilities. A paediatrician from the centre who is one of the most experienced doctors in the field in Iceland at working with children with visual impairment will have on their responsible for developing guidelines for health and educational professionals in partnership with University of Leuven. The activities that are going to be supported by this project is intellectual output of knowledge of cerebral vision impairment. This is done by making a educational resources, training materials and seminar for teachers. The methodology used in carrying out the project will be a typical project management methodology. 1. Initiation, 2. planning and design, 3. execution, 4. monitoring and control and 5. closing. We have already begun in the first steps of the project where we have already initiated the idea and started to plan it with budget control, scope and responsibilities. It's not until we have our first meeting where the execution of the project begins where we will over a three year period work on the resource material, web site, develop the screening and the guidelines, host a multiplier event and workshops in our own countries. We envisage that through our project there will be awareness raising in Europe that we can help to fulfill a need for special training for teachers working with students with cerebral visual impairment and that we can help to fulfill that need with our training material, screening and guidelines. Through our work we hope health care and educational professionals will be more interested and have increased knowledge in cerebral visual impairment and more children will be identified and receive the help they need for their disability. It is well known that children that don't recognize their fellow students because of things like face blindness experience barriers.The potential longer term benefits of the project is that the knowledge of CVI will be included in the training of teachers that work with students with CVI and they will no longer be thought to not have the ability to read or write, their right for literacy will be the same as fellow students in the school system.