It’s finally here!

On September 28^th, 2020, on the premises of the Faculty of Philosophy, there was a promotion of the first e-platform in our country accessible for students with disabilities. The FAST (2018-2021) project: An accessible Learning management system in Humanities and Social Sciences, which is an Erasmus+KA203 project led to the creation of such a system, which today is accessible for three groups of students with disabilities: students with impaired vision, students with impaired hearing and students with specific reading disabilities – dyslexia.

The transnational implementation of the Erasmus+ FAST project was vital because of the exchange of good practices with our partner countries that have a tradition of online systems usage. The accessibility plug-ins created within this project are installed on the e-learning platforms on the University in Aveiro and the Vilnius University.

Promotors of the event:

Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, prof. Ratko Duev, PhD
FAST coordinator, prof. Aleksandra Karovska Ristovska, PhD
IT experts, asst. prof. Monika Simjanoska, PhD and teaching asst. Kostadin MIshev, M.Sc.

Guided by the principle of Universal Design in Learning, our team decided to create a generic model of an accessible learning management system and to make it accessible for students with disabilities in the early stages of development. For that purpose, three plug-ins were created:

Dyslexia plug-in for students with dyslexia. By using this plug-in, every single text within the platform can be converted in the DyslexicFZF font (created by the Faculty of Philosophy). This plug-in enables change of background colors as well.

Plug-in for sign language. For the creation of this plug-in 150 sign language videos were made and embedded in the platform. In this manner, deaf persons could follow the instructions from the platform in Macedonian Sign Language.

Text-to-speech plug-in. With this plug-in, every single text on the platform can be converted in humanoid speech. Within this plug-in, the first open-source synthetizator in Macedonian language based on the deep-learning approach – MAKEDONKA was created.