Able To Include: Making IT Inclusive

Before I became a PhD student, I was an intern at the Centre for Computational Linguistics. The first day of my internship also marked the beginning of a European Union-funded project named Able to Include. As my task was to help building the English and Spanish versions of the Centre's Text-to-Pictograph translation system, my little intern self "accidentally" got involved in the Able project. Quite a good accident, I must say! :)

Able to Include aims to improve the living conditions of people with Intellectual or Developmental Disabilities (IDD) by integrating a set of existing technologies to create an "accessibility layer". This layer can be integrated with ICT tools and improve the daily life of people with IDD. The three key technologies are Picto (Text-to-Pictograph translation and Pictograph-to-Text translation, KU Leuven), Simplext (text simplification, UPF Barcelona) and Text-to-Speech (Teamnet, Romania).

Our previous meeting took place in Leuven. Having discovered that I'm a freelance illustrator, our partner Silvana (Inclusion Europe) asked me to make custom illustrations for our three web services. They will be used on the easy-to-read version of Able's website.

Have a nice weekend!

Leen

Able to Include, September 2015 

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