The European Commission names RoboBraille winner of award
The team behind the Danish RoboBraille-service was receiving loud acclamation when their project won the e-Accessibility Award, given by the European Commission Monday night at the City Hall in Vienna.
"It goes without saying that we are both honoured and proud to be selected to receive the eInclusion award. This is an important recognition of the RoboBraille service as an enabler for a more inclusive information society. We hope that the award and the media attention it creates will enable us to reach even more print-impaired people,
" says Lars Ballieu Christensen, RoboBraille administrator and co-inventor of the service.
The European Commission has founded the e-Inclusion Award to set focus on the innovative use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to help digitally and socially excluded Europeans. All projects are already improving the quality of life of many people and should help inspire others to do more. "My colleagues and I are doing our best to offer our users an email service which meets their needs. In example we have just added translation of jpg-, tiff-, gif-files as well as pdf-files to the RoboBraille service. Winning this award obviously inspires us to continue the innovation of RoboBraille,
" he says.
About RoboBraille
RoboBraille is an email-based service capable of translating electronic documents into either synthetic speech or contracted Braille. The service is available free of charge to all non-commercial users, and you do not need to register before using it.
RoboBraille seeks to solve a universal problem – making otherwise inaccessible electronic documents accessible to people with visual or reading impairments.
Originally a Danish service, RoboBraille has been validated in Ireland, Cyprus, Italy, Portugal and Great Britain in the framework of a pan-European consortium supported by the European Commission. The Danish part of RoboBraille has been available since 2004. In January 2007, support for British English, Italian, Portuguese and Greek was added to the service. In June and July, French and Lithuanian were added.
Currently, RoboBraille receives financial support from the Danish Ministry of Social Welfare, as well as the Danish Ministry of Education. The RoboBraille project has previously been named winner of the Well-Tech ‘Innovation and Accessibility Award (2008) and British Computer Societies’ ‘Social Contribution Award’ (2007)
For more information on the RoboBraille service and how to use it, please visit www.robobraille.org
About e-Inclusion
The 2008 e-Inclusion Ministerial Conference is held in Vienna from 30 November to 2 December in the Reed Messe Congress Centre. It is a jointly organised by the European Commission and the hosting Austrian Government, in cooperation with the French Presidency of the Council of the European Union.
For more information, please visit: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/events/e-inclusion/2008/index_en.htm
About Synscenter Refsnaes
RoboBraille is developed and operated by Synscenter Refsnaes, the national centre for blind and partially sighted children and youth in Denmark. Catering for 2,000 students and their relatives and teachers, Synscenter Refsnaes has provided educational services, boarding facilities and enabling technologies for more than a century.
For more information, please visit: www.synref.dk
Contact information
Lars Ballieu Christensen
RoboBraille Coordinator, Leader of the RoboBraille Consortium
Telephone: +45 40 32 68 23.
Email: lbc@robobraille.org
or
Rikke Syberg
Project Manager
Telephone: + 45 48 22 10 03
Email: rikke@robobraille.org