In a two years project four organisations from Belgium, Germany, Italy and Turkey exchange on god practices of creative ways of making historical, architectural and cultural urban heritage more inclusive, interactive and so accessible for young people with handicap mainly visually impaired persons (following called VIP). The context/background of the planned project is that young people with sight loss want to move around in cities independently and have an autonomous own access to the structure of buildings and cities in their historical, cultural and architectural meaning. Guided tours through cities are widely not accessible for visually impaired persons neither live tours nor online tours via app or internet. Furthermore, such tours are often not arranged for the target group of young people in being interactive and multisensory. The missing points are: -Support in mobility and navigation -Access to places that are highly interesting for many senses like hearing, touching, smelling and tasting -Descriptions of visible elements in cities like buildings, squares and streets - Additional tactile material like models and maps The objectives of the project are: -People with sight loss name their needs in getting access to urban cultural heritage. -City guides get experiences in guiding visually impaired people through cities. -New ways of multi-sensory and interactive inclusive city tours are experienced by creative mangers of adoption the cultura heritage of cities.-In four European countries eight city tours with blind and partially sighted persons are made up by creative methods, experienced and evaluated. -Guidelines for city guides are drafted to guide in a creative and inclusive way making the tours accessible for visual impaired persons. -Four city tours with GPS data and audio-recordings of descriptions are published The activities of the project are: -Partners exchange experiences in city tours with visual impaired persons.-Visually impaired people name their needs in access to urban heritage in a Europe wide spread questionary. The results will be evaluated and published. -The project partners meet in the project countries for learning activities to create and experience guided tour – two in each country – and evaluate them. In a creative process they conceptulice multi-senory inclusive tours with the aspects: access to cultural heritage by seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting; understanding the past in acting; audio-descriptions; additionally support in mobility for blind and partially sighted people.-In each partner country one tour will be recorded in its GPS data and in audio format of the descriptions that are given. -The so created tours will be published online. So it will be tested, if such a form of access to city tours is accessible for people - specially with visua impairment.-A guideline will be drafted about the creative process how to make inclusive and accessible multisensory city tours not only for visually impaired but for all people. The activities and participants are: -6-12/2021: research on needs of young people with sight loss on their needs concerning city tours - Europe-wide 200 participants -02/2022: meeting in Berlin: evaluation of the researches done, creating and experiencing two multisensory and inclusive guided city tours - 5 participants of each partner country, 10 additional participants from Germany-5/2022: meeting in Istanbul: first overview of guidelines for accessible and inclusive guided tours (in museums, nature parks etc., creating and experiencing two multisensory and inclusive guided city tours - 5 participants of each partner country, 10 additional participants from Turkey-10/2022: meeting in Liège: first draft of guidelines for accessible and inclusive guided city tours, creating and experiencing two multisensory and inclusive guided city tours - 5 participants of each partner country, 10 additional participants from Belgium- 3/2023: meeting in Florence: finalising draft of guidelines for multisensory and inclusive guided city tours, creating and experiencing two multisensory and inclusive guided city tours, conference on accessible tourism for exchange of practices collected in the project - 8 participants of each partner country, 10 additional participants from Italy

Nature experience for impaired people and tourism for all is an important topic in the EU. Destinations like national parks, nature reserves and other locations for nature experience begin to implement such offers. Hence, guidance for such destinations is missing to judge on the prerequisites onsite and to enable decision makers to start with implementing relevant installations and alterations. A good catalogue of nature education activities for environmental educationists is still missing. The German Association of Blind and Visually Impaired People has invented guidelines for nature trails and other purposes. Partners from environmental education organisations in Germany, Poland, Hungary and Spain active in European lake regions in this project also collected expertise in some aspects of that topic. Together, we want to incorporate these experiences in the Lakes without Limits project, broaden our own knowledge, and pass it to the others.Lakes without Limits aims on working to improve adult education for nature experience by developing, testing and disseminating educational material to foster skills of environmental educationists with respect to disabled people. It will provide guidance for two questions:1. How can environmental educationists improve their offer for guided nature experience with impaired people? These educationists can either be employed in a nature conservation centre, or freelancer or volunteers.2. How can nature trails be prepared and/or altered for the unaccompanied use of impaired people. The target group here are managers and environmental educationists responsible for such trails.The material developed will enable its users setting of personal pedagogical goals and following the success thanks to correspondent checklists. The whole material will be available for the broad audience. Concrete examples for work with impaired people on nature conservation/experience will be produced: barrier free brochures, audio guides, 3D-Material, Sign- and Simple Language Films.The focus will be on tourist destinations in participating countries Poland, Hungary, Germany, and Spain, as well as areas of special conservation interest.With this, we want to bring forward the inclusion of disabled persons in the EU and foster the sensitivity to nature for all Europeans. We wish to generate momentum for nature experience for impaired people.

"Even though they have undergone a vocational training or obtained a degree at university, in Europe 70 % of the viually impaired adults are unemployed. The idea behind the implementation of this strategic partnership was to foster the importance of this issue, to search and motivate employers to emploi visually impaired persons. VIEWS International in cooperation with five partner organizations from Germany (two promoters: ""DBSV""-German Federation of the Blind & Partially Sighted/Central office from Berlin and ""LWL"" - a vocational training center for blind and partially sighted from Soest), Italy (two promoters: ""Soc. Coop. Aforisma"" - vocational training center and job support center for impaired persons from Pisa and ""Istittuto Rittmeyer"", a integration center for visually impaired center from Trieste ) and France (one promoter: ""GIAA"" - a blind association developping projects around social and professional integration for visually impaired in Paris area) established a 19 months strategic partnership, from 1/10/2015 till 30/04/2017. ""VIP awareness raising against unemployment"" gathered institutions with different profiles (ngoes, public bodies), all working for the integration of visually impaired persons, mainly unemployed young visually impaired persons. The estimated number of the persons involved in this project is around 500.Due to lack of operational capacity, the French partner, GIAA, retired from the implementation of this project on 31/08/2016, after 11 months of collaboration.The overall aims were to: - develop a strong partnership between the partners of the project;- attract more institutions that could hire or offer internships for young visually impaired young persons and sensitize and aware them in order to get a better understanding of the living condition vision impairment; with the purpose of improving the employment environment of vision impaired persons, by decreasing attitudinal barriers, imparting of important knowledge and raising awareness for their strengths and needs, as well as for the specific support given by each state both to employers and employees.This strategic partnership included: 3 transnational meetings (the first one in Liège, Belgium, the second in Trieste, Italy and the last one in Berlin, Germany), 3 long term mobility projects (of 3 months each: in Liège, Pisa and Trieste) , 4 multiplier events (1per country) and 20 awareness national sessions (5/country). The consortuim equally created an awareness brochure and a policy paper as intelectual outputs; these products were disseminated among diffrent European and national stakeholders.As main result, this project achieved building a strong partnership, where more institutions supported our partnership and activity development. On an individual basis, the three youth mobility projects were very useful for the 3 visually impaired workers on a personal level (aquiring new skills) and on a social development (first time working experience). The awareness raising session, had a great impact on the participants and helped future employers be more open to hiring visually impaired persons. In the future, the Italian and Belgian partners would like to continue their work on professional integration of visually impaired young persons through a new strategic partnership project. As for the long-term benefits, we observed that this strategic partnership improved the interaction between different employement institutions, employers and visually impaired beneficiaries; especially the self esteem and empowerment of the young visually impaired persons that took part in this project."

Museums constitute an essential part of the European cultural landscape serving as a key player in preserving cultural heritage on the one hand, and as platforms for contemporary forms of expression on the other. They showcase cultural evolution spanning over thousands of years, covering several epochs, beginning with archaeological exhibits up to modern art. However, museums primarily address the visual senses and blind and visually impaired people, therefore, are excluded from a wide range of services offered by traditional museums, including the museums’ role as platform where informal learning takes place. But times are changing and innovative 3D technologies and multi-sensory methods offer solutions for blind and visually impaired people, by enabling them to get in touch with exhibits and to participate in educational programs offered by museums. A small number of museums in Europe offer access to blind and visually impaired people through the use of 3D technology. Some museums started setting-up such projects in the recent years, but faced budgetary, technical and conceptual obstacles that needed to be overcome. However, museums which managed to complete such projects, received extremely positive feedback from blind and visually impaired people.The project AMBAVis aimed to be a driving force for the development and the spreading of such 3D practices in museums by providing comprehensive information and research on that issue. The project, therefore, has acted on existing approaches and refined technical solutions, in order to allow an understanding of how to improve them and to generate more affordable tactile models for museums in the future. Within the project tactile models, 3D objects and multi-sensory methods have been developed and tested. Feedback from blind and visually impaired people was a crucial part in this process in order to get a better insight in the usability of the different technologies and to increase accessibility to museums and their educational programs for blind and visually impaired people. Furthermore, examples of good practice have been compiled as well as key elements identified that are essential for a successful implementation of projects in this context. As improving access to museums for blind and visually impaired people is a multi-faceted issue, a comprehensive approach was chosen to also address the economic and legal aspects. Therefore, the project was accompanied by an analysis facing the economic impact and the respective legal framework of the emerging use of 3D technology and applications in museums. The economic impact of the use of 3D technologies and tactile models in museums has been measured in order to show, that there is a broader value added in terms of gross value added and employment arising in the EU-28. Finally, questions concerning copyright issues occurring in the context of tactile models created for blind and visually impaired visitors in museums have been analyzed and clarified, as they have a high practical relevance when implementing such projects.The project’s results have been shared with other stakeholders and the public through extensive dissemination activities in various fields, e.g. exhibiting the models developed in public events, presenting the results at conferences, publishing articles in mass media as well as specific professional journals, informing on proceedings and results on the project website www.ambavis.eu, releasing press releases and conducting a press conference and a final workshop for the interested public at the end of the project. Moreover, another European project in this context (ARCHES – Accessible Resources for Cultural Heritage Ecosystems, http://arches-project.eu/) has emerged out of the project’s activities that is based on ideas created within and continuing the work of AMBAVis.The findings provide museums, stakeholders and decision makers with a better understanding of the issue and allow for better and more cost-efficient implementation of 3D technology in museums. Furthermore, haptic results in the form of tactile models have been produced which will stay publicly accessible in the partner museums also after the official end of AMBAVis. Although the project aimed at blind and visually impaired people, the use of 3D objects and multi-sensory-opportunities has turned out to be very useful for pupils in educational facilities or in old people’s homes in the future too.The strategic partnership consisted of 7 partner organizations from Austria, Slovakia, Germany and Great Britain. The project partners were museums, an institute for economic and legal research, a center for application oriented research in the area of Visual Computing, a NGO in the field of audio description for blind and visually impaired people, and national blind unions.

Background of the project:The World Health Organisation estimates, in figures dating from 2010, that in Europe there are 26.350.000 visually impaired individuals.Looking at the data of the participating countries: there are 12.500 visually impaired in Slovenia, 645.000 in Germany and 25.000 in Croatia.Visually impaired Europeans are undoubtedly among the most vulnerable and least visible members of society. For the most part they are at the bottom end of the earnings league. Poverty and social exclusion are inextricably linked and are caused by a complex combination of factors: poor education and housing, unemployment, inaccessible information, negative attitudes and prejudices... The success of visually impaired is highly determined by the level of their personal readiness and motivation, by the environment, as well as the level of technical support they have access to. Visually impaired lack the technological support, which would help them use the audio materials without the support of librarians, mentors and family members; while librarians should be specially trained, especially for part of human communication with users. Objectives of the project:- To Increase the accessibility of learning materials and literature for the visually impaired by providing free and independent access to them - To equip librarians / mentors of visually impaired with the knowledge, skills and competences to be able to support the use of the Audibook library for visually impaired Direct target groups of the projects are:- Associations and organizations for visually impaired in participating countries as well as all over EU, who need and wish to provide improved access to educational materials and literature to visually impaired. Indirect target groups are:- Other audiobooks copyright holders, who lack safety arrangements in the existing platforms in order to be willing to share their books.- Other educational organizations, who lack a safe and easy to use tool to share their learning materials among theirs students.End users are:- Visually impaired, who are in need to obtain easy and completely independent access to the learning materials and literature.- Librarians / mentors who work with visually impaired, who lack sufficient knowledge, skills and competence to support the use of the new technical tool for the visually impaired.Around 400 of the target groups will be directly included in the project implementation.Main project activities will lead to the develop the following intellectual outputs:1.Web platform “Second Sight”Development of an online platform for organizations for the blind and partially sighted, publishers, educational organizations and other copyright holders on existing audio recordings that want to grant free access to the existing audio books to the visually impaired through the »Audibook Library for Visually Impaired« mobile application. The web platform opens a channel to these entities, through which, without any costs, they can offer the audiobooks to the target audience (blind and partially sighted), without any fear that the book will copied and shared to the people who is not in titled to the free access. 2.Mobile application “Audibooks Library for the Visually Impaired”“Audibook Library for Visually Impaired” is a library for the blind and partially sighted, which enables them to fully and independently browse and read the available audio materials due to the voice management of the mobile application and on the spot available voice support in case of any troubles. The download of the mobile application and all audio books and learning materials within the mobile application is enabled (and free of charge) to all who show their status as blind or partially sighted with appropriate documents.3.Training programme and learning materials for librarians / mentors for visually impairedTraining of librarians and mentors who work with visually impaired will include transfer of knowledge, skills and competences that they need to motivate, educate and support the end users to use the new tool.Project will start with the web platform development, which is the basis for the mobile app development. Both IO will be tested and evaluated by the visually impaired and librarians /mentors. After finalization of the mobile application, the training programme and learning materials for the librarians / mentors will be developed, tested and finalized based on the evaluation findings.Project will contribute to:- Improved access to the learning materials and books for the visually impaired- Increased use of the audio books by the visually impaired - Improved social inclusion of the visually impaired- Improved knowledge, skills and competences of the librarians / mentors of visually impaired.