On September 19, the Russian State Library hosted an interactive event “Digital Literacy - Easy Dive”, at which they talked a lot about the importance of digital literacy for blind schoolchildren and their parents.
The participants of the meeting - visually challenged and blind children, as well as their parents and teachers - got acquainted with the interactive online project "Study the Internet & Govern It", developed by the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ with the support of Rostelecom. The main goal of the project is to increase the level of digital literacy of users, introduce them to the structure of Internet technologies and teach them how to surf the Internet safely.
Some of the game modules of the “Study the Internet” were recently adapted for blind people together with the project Everland - Space for Equal Opportunities.
The presentation “Study the Internet” was made by the Head of the project department of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Olga Yakovleva. She presented games for the visually challenged and expressed the hope that the participants of this event would thoroughly test them, and also help create new modules on IT topics of interest to them. “Perhaps our project will become an important starting point in the choice of profession for children with visual impairments. And someone will decide to become an accessibility tester for projects from different fields of activity - from banking to education. And the slogan “Nothing About Us Without Us” will become the main one for the guys,” said Olga Yakovleva.
Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Andrey Vorobyev stated that the global ICT community, of which the Coordination Center is a part, has realized the importance of youth participation in Internet Governance, including in terms of its inclusiveness and accessibility as the most important components of this process: “ ...Now, having developed a game that teaches digital technologies, we have taken the first step towards ensuring that people with visual disabilities in Russia are participants in the global process of Internet Governance, gain knowledge, study our educational modules in a playful way and ultimately take part in the development of rules according to which the Internet should develop.”
The event was hosted by Yulia Vasilyeva, PR manager of the basic course on digital literacy for visually challenged children and adolescents, and Dmitry Krotov, a 10th grade student at boarding school No. 1. Motivational speakers also addressed the meeting: graduate of Moscow State University of Psychology & Education Vsevolod Popov, Head of non-visual accessibility at Everland Alexander Pashkevich, and curator of volunteer programs at Everland Dana Drozhzhina. They all talked about themselves and how they mastered digital technologies, what problems they help solve in the modern world, and how the "Study the Internet & Govern It" project, in which training takes place in the form of a game, can be useful for beginning users.
“For optically challenged children and youths, the key to the digital world is screen readers. They are the ones who pronounce everything that users without disabilities see on the screen of their gadgets. Having learned to use such programs, a blind student can greatly change for the better the process of studying, leisure time and awareness in general,” said Dana Drozhzhina. – “But when the skills of working with screen readers appear, and a novice user goes online and tries to communicate on social networks, it is important to obtain general primary information about these processes. And this problem is perfectly solved by the module for the blind in the “Study the Internet & Govern It” project. Here, the most important parts of the processes taking place in the world of digital technology are described in a simple and accessible form. Short test tasks allow you to understand how much the student has mastered everything he has covered in the theoretical block.”
We would like to note that the section for blind users on the website of the “Study the Internet & Govern It” consists of 5 test modules: The structure of a modern computer; Communication on the Internet; How the Internet works; How and why to protect personal data and personal information; What is Artificial Intelligence.
Several quizzes were held at the event based on these modules. The guys answered questions about what a browser is and in what year its prototype appeared, what network rules exist and how bans and floods are related to them, which board game was the first to be mastered by AI, and what device helps read text and graphic information from paper carrier. The most active participants received prizes from the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ, as well as the opportunity to become the hero of a motivational interview on the blog of a basic digital literacy course from Everland.
“Rostelecom actively supports educational projects and considers it very important to develop children and adolescents’ skills for safe Internet use. We are confident that the new module of the “Study the Internet & Govern It” will allow blind students to improve digital literacy and increase interest in IT professions. This will give a big impetus to self-development and self-realization,” said Natalya Beloshitskaya, Head of special and social projects at Rostelecom.
Natalya Arakcheeva, Advisor to the Director of the Russian State Children's Library, told the participants what opportunities the library has to serve blind users: “For example the NVDA screen access program is installed, on one of the computers in the hall of Fiction and Literary Studies No. 234 (11+), thanks to which blind readers can use Internet resources, including reading e-books.” Some of the students here said that this was not their first time in the library and were attending classes of the project for teenagers with visual impairments “Literary Travel as a Way to Get Acquainted with Stories and Culture.”
A recording of the event's stream was published on the official YouTube channel of the Coordination Center, and a photo report was published in the Flickr gallery of the Russian State Children's Library.
A report was also prepared about the event by correspondents from the Вместе.РФ TV channel.
