Half a hundred people took part last Thursday, November 3rd, in the fourth multiplier event organized by the partners of the Erasmus+ European Project Train2Validate, which has the aim of building certificate studies for Easy-to-Read validators and facilitators.
The conference, titled ‚For an Easy-to-Read Internet‘, took place at SDI Munich campus and had the participation of two women with intellectual disabilities who work as Easy-to-Read validators in Netzwerk Leichte Sprache and Zavod Risa. Both of them claimed the value of Easy-to-Read Guidelines to get an Internet for all and as a way to include them as workers in society.
Spang, who also validates webpages, highlighted a good contrast, headings, typography, larger letters, and no pop-ups as fundamental aspects that help the comprehension of texts on websites.
For her part, Kos emphasizes the rights of people with intellectual disabilities or comprehension difficulties to know and participate in society, and make visible their important contribution through their work.
„Validation in E2R is a job and I enjoy it. If we work, we are included in society“, she said.
Important coincidences in the overlapping between Easy-to-Read and Web Accessibility Guidelines
The conference also brought together several experts in accessibility, who discussed different aspects of relevance to achieving an Internet for all.
Rocío Bernabé, researcher at SDI Munich, and Stefanie Koehler, Netzwerk Leichte Sprache, presented an overlapping between the Web Accesibility Guidelines and the Easy-to-Read Guidelines, finding a correlation between E2R and accessible Internet standards in 35 out of 66 criteria. They both underscored that validation is the key to an accessible Information and Communication Technologies.
The first trainning materials for E2R validators and facilitators were presented
The evolution of the development of the Train2Validate project was one of the objectives of this Conference. Piero Cavallo and Tatjana Knapp, in the representation of two organization members of the consortium, SDI Munich and Zavod Risa, presented the first training materials created for the future certification course for Easy-to-Read validators and facilitators.
Training materials that, as they highlighted, try to provide with the necessary contents to acquire the skills for both courses. Videos, tasks and reading lists are some of the materials that trainees will have available in a Google Classroom platform to be presented in June 2023 in the last multiplier event in Slovenia. Cavallo and Knapp also underlined the need of validation of the trainings in several stages that will include a piloting in all partnership languages with potential trainees.