In Turkey the number of people with disabilities is approximately 8,5 million (ÖZİDA 2002). 3,5 million of them are consisted of children and they require special education (PEKUSLU&KAYACI,2007). If those children are considered as if they had a family which has got at least 2 members, the number of individuals who are affected by it primarily reach at least 10,5 milllion. This number goes up by higher amounts when the stuff taking care of these children such as educater, sanitarian etc has been taken into consideration. It can clearly be seen how much special education is important even looking from this perspective.Children with special needs have limited attention span and their attention can easily be distracted. They have difficulty in understanding words or concepts. The studies Show that computer assisted learning increases the motivation level of disabled students and it enables them to increase their attention span so that they enjoy studying. Also the studies comparing the contents of traditional education programs and computer assisted program shows that computer assisted programs are more effective in learning process of children with special needs. With the help of Computer Assisted Programs, disabled children can become active members of society who can sustain a social and occupational life independently. Blue Platform is a complete free of charge platform that is available for all children with special needs, their parents and their teachers. Target audience of this project are the individuals with special needs, the ones with medium-heavy mental deficiency and the ones with autism spectrum disorder. In 2018 National Ministry of Education renovated the curriculum of individuals with medium-heavy mental deficiency and autism spectrum disorder. Blue Platform has been designed according to this new curricula. Blue Platform includes the targets of levels and syllabus on the list down below.Level 1: Maths, Reading and Writing Skills, Social Skills, Social StudiesLevel 2: Maths, Reading and Writing Skills, Social Skills, Daily Life SkillsLevel 3: Maths, Reading and Writing Skills, Communication and Social Skills, Independent Living SkillsThe main goal of Blue Platform is to make a contribution to the equality of opportunity in special education. Blue Platform is totally free of charge and will always remain free of charge. IMPARK, one of the partner institutions which has built the engineering sytem of our project stated that they would carry on saving the system on their servers as long as the company exist. This statement added priceless value to the project in term of sustainability and upgradablity.Blue Platform is designed for being used as a supplementary material. The way how you use it is very simple. Pupils can use it with the help of their teachers or parents an deven by themselves in an easy way. Blue Platform is a web based Learning Management System (LMS). It does not require set-up. It is available on every smarts board or computer with internet connection. Training screens starts with learning section and after that part it carries on with the reinforcement part. After they cover the lessons, some reinforcement tools such as games, songs, animations, stories etc. that are to achieve the goals of the lessons appear on the screen. There are school module, teacher module and parent module sections.Intellectual Outputs:O1/Blue Special LMS: The first intellectual output of the project, LMS, is the core of Blue Platform.O2/Learning Contents: The learning contents of Blue Platform that engineering studies has been carried out in the previous output, have been prepared in O2 part.O3/Preparing Animations for Educational Objectives: Animation added to Blue Platform has been prepared on O3 intellectual output. It is not only limited with animations, plenty of videos were also prepared.O4/Preparing Games for Educational Objectives: Assistive technology in the field of education opens greater opportunities for disabled children to become fully active members in learning period. Didactic computer games are also one of them. Games being added to Blue Platform has been prepared on O4. O5/Vocalizations: Vocalizations of Blue Platform has been done on O5.Pilot scheme of Blue Platform has started on 28th May 2018 with the participation of more than 70 special education teachers from 20 different cities. With the help of feedbacks received from the teachers, optimizations and refinements have been done. All the results of survey on pilot scheme are available on official website of our project.Under the theme of Universal Design in Information Technologies, BİLTEVT2019, the International Barrier-Free Informatics Congress held on between 11-13th September 2019 with inter-institutional cooperation hosted by Maltepe University. Blue Platform was granted Barrier-Free Informatics Award. For being our first award really precious to us, it gave much more determination to work on our project.

When Turkey Disability Survey and Turkey Employment Agency’s data are examined together, the maximum of %15 of hearing impaired individuals are capable to work and only 5% of them are employed. It can be said that, 95% of hearing impaired individuals are unemployed. The target audience of our Project is hearing impaired individuals between the ages of 18-30 who don’t have any business.The basic desire of the hearing impaired individuals is to find a respectable place in society by producing as every healthy human. To participate in their social life, depends to sustain independent living. The most important way to ensure this is employment. If hearing impaired individuals work, produce and gain, they participate in social life and get happy. Unemployment is a huge problem. The most important aim for the hearing impaired should be to remove this issue from the agenda of them. Our main reason for making this Project is to prepare a new certification program for hearing impaired individuals in order to provide employment.With this study, we will educate hearing impaired tour guides who use sign language and we will offer different job opportunities to hearing impaired people by creating a new model of vocational training. A training program is not available in this area. If appropriate educational areas are created, numerous hearing impaired people may be employed in this sector. Well trained persons with disabilities will have more opportunities to have a job. This study is a first and completely original work to open a new field of employment for hearing impaired citizens in our country. At first, the participants that we trained will work with professional tour guides as assistants. There isn’t a certificate program for hearing impaired individuals for being tour guides with cockades in our country. This certificate program will be created within our project. Project Partners:Doncaster Deaf Trust (England)Fundación Pública Andaluza el Legado Andalusí (Spain)Istituto Statale Sordi (Italy)Asociatia Tedy Bear (Romania)Turkish National Federation of the DeafChamber of the Guides of İzmir (İZRO)Buca AcademyThroughout the process, we aim to convert the certificate program that we have prepared as a tour guide of a Deaf Faculty in a university. After compilation of our project, the results that we aim to achieve can be summarized below.• Developing the Tour Guide Certificate Program” for hearing disabled.• Creating a new employment area for hearing impaired people.• To provide guidence for domestic and foreign hearing impaired individuals.• To create a workforce that can adapt to evolving technology and can struggle with the competitive market technology by giving better quality of vocational training. • Giving importance to sign language training in vocational education area.• Understanding different applications resulting from intercultural recognition.• Participants will have the opportunity learn the mother tongue and sign language of the country they visited also can explain their language and develop their foreign language.The methodology of our project can be summarized as a route map consisting of 5 steps.a. Preparation of Projectb. Conceptual Designc. Applicationd. Continuous assessment and evaluatione. Dissemination and SustainabilityOur project is a 24 months study and the operating plan adopted by all of our partners are as follows. Preparation Of General Meeting (Turkey)Preparation Of General Meeting (Spain)General Preparation MeetingSelection Of Youth Hearing Impaired PartıcipantsPreparation Of Lesson PlansBasic Turkish Sign Language EducationEnglish Language TeachingVocational Training Courses-Section 1Vocational Training Courses-Section 2 Preparation Of International Sign Language (ISL) EducationISL Training Preparation Of Evaluation Meeting and Tourism TrainingEvaluation MeetingTourism TrainingPreparations Of Vocational Training Application In Field (Aegean Region)Vocational Training Application In Field (Aegean Region)Preparations Of Vocational Training Application In Field (Abroad)Vocational Training Application In Field (Abroad )Collection Of Assessment Results, Finalization And Reporting The Study Intellectual Outputs - Preparation Of Vocational Education Certificate Program.Fulfillment of the first meeting, the distribution of tasks.Determination of Vocational and Applied Education, Foreign Language and ISL training.Determination of Norms of National Occupational Standards Determination of Qualification LevelPreparation of Intellectual Outputs BookPreparation Of Final meetings Preparation of Multiplier EventsFinal Meeting in Izmir/TurkeyMultiplier Events/ İstanbul ConferenceMultiplier Events/Ankara ConferencePreparation of the Project Booklet and Final ReportPublishing Project Booklet