Increasing the quality of care, and the quality of life for people with Cortical Visual Impairement (CVI) is something professionals worldwide endeavour.
This webinar, presented by Femke van der Veer, from Visio (the Netherlands) on June 17th 2021, aimed to give its participants more insight into CVI and the implications on daily life as well as introducing Visio’s instrument “CVI in the Picture”.
On the 29th of April 2021, Markus Raffer, founder and CEO of Tec-Innovation, with the cooperation of Klaus Höckner from the our member Hilfsgemeinschaft, Austria, presented to our members the InnoMake, a warning system built into shoes, developed to make everyday life safer for visually impaired and blind people through intelligent obstacle detection.
On March 23rd 2021 we had the pleasure to have Juan Ruiz, presenting a webinar about echolocation for our members.
Juan Ruiz is a Perceptual Navigation Instructor and Flash Sonar Coach. Himself also a user, he teaches his students how to better perceive the space around them, using sound to get an acoustic read on their surroundings.
This year, on March 16th, our General Meeting was again done online.
Focusing on the usual subjects like the financial report of our Association and runing projects, we also had the announcement of our next board election, to be elected in October this year.
Hopefully, we started to prepare our next physical meeting: our General Meeting in Angers 2022, for the celebration of ENVITER‘s 20th Anniversary.
Photo by Pete Linforth from Pixabay.
Hilde van der Aa, Marit van Buijsen and Lia van der Ham from the Robert Coppes Foundation, in The Netherland, presented on the 23 February 2021 an overview of mental illness in visually impaired adults, an introduction to a basic attitude in working with this target group and an elaboration on PTSD.
Photo by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.
During the afternoon of the 26thof January 2021 we developed another webinar, this time about “Distance Learning and Training for VIP: how are we doing it…”.
This was the perfect opportunity for our members to exchange some ideas, presenting the different areas they have and how are they coping with the “new” issues imposed by the distance learning for visually impaired people in this pandemic situation and home-office time.
To kick star this webinar/exchange, we had 3 presentations:
This webinar was attended by 37 participants from our members, joining from countries like Austria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxemburg, and Portugal.
Photo by Mikhail Nilov from Pexels.
For the first time, HIPEN and ENVITER members jointly organized a webinar (by Zoom), looking to practically introduce the European Solidarity Corps programme. The European Solidarity Corps is a European Commission programme funding projects to enable young adults from 18 to 30 of age to have experiences and make opportunities abroad.
All organizations throughout Europe can apply to be hosting or sending organisations, for the benefit of young people with sensory disabilities.
A concrete introduction of this programme and its added value for organisations and young people was presented on January 13th 2021 by Enrico Dolza from Turin (Italy).
On the 14th of December 2020, for an audience of about 20 people from different European countries, ENVITER had its first ever Webinar, using Zoom.
The theme was “The role of a Visual Impairment professional in Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) services”, presented by Monika Toth and Krisztina Katona, from Hungary.
If you are interested in this subject, you can take a look at the presentation or contact our Hungarian partner (School for the Blind, Budapest)
The ENVITER Network had its 2020 Virtual Online Conference on September 30, hosted by the Berufsförderungswerk Halle in Germany. Subject: Digitisation – challenge and opportunity for the blind.
The purpose of our Annual Conference is to create an intellectual platform for professionals to share their theoretical and practical knowledge in the field of vision impairment, focusing especially on innovative methodologies, practices and tools.
Presentations:
1. Accessible curriculum computational thinking by Wendy Voorn, Royal Visio, Huizen, NL
2. PsyMate™ project by Uta Roentgen et al, Robert Coppes Foundation, Vught, NL
3. E-mental health for depression and anxiety in patients who receive anti-VEGF treatment: the E-PsEYE trial by Hilde van der Aa et al, Amsterdam UMC, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Ophthalmology, Amsterdam Public Health Research Institute, Amsterdam, NL
4. Automatic description of educational images for visually impaired users by Ralph Ewerth, TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, Hannover, DE
5. Digitisation – challenge and opportunity for the blind: teaching Apple Voice Over by Eline van Samang, Braille Liga, Brussels, BE
Tactual Profile is an observation instrument for charting the tactual functioning of children with a severe visual impairment from birth to sixteen years old. The instrument concentrates on the tactual requirements that the everyday environment places on perception.
Tactual perceiving and functioning are explicitly viewed in a broader sense than reading braille or understanding geographical maps or graphs. For example when a visually impaired child is playing with dolls, it has to know how to hold a spoon and be able to find the doll’s mouth in order to feed the doll.
See the website: tactualprofile.org
or email tactualprofile@visio.org