Aim of this project is to facilitate the enjoyment of digitally available scientific resources to visually impaired students and researchers. The main barriers encountered by visually impaired students going through scientific materials are: -the poor accessibility in text books, mainly referring to mathematical expressions, and devoted educational materials (exercises, professor's notes); -the difficulties to get graphs, diagrams and technical drawings in tactile format or other alternative format (i.e haptic devices); -the lack of personal software and hardware tools to perform the main activities involved in scientific research. These constrains can be overcome by a shared knowledge of previously and locally implemented solutions. Solutions exist but they are developed mainly on local bases. The same texts and instruments are newly adapted each time they are needed. This is an extremely expensive and time consuming process and it is due to an almost complete missing communication among the different actors involved in the scholarly flow.

The main actors involved in this process are the scientific resources providers (digital resources providers, university libraries), the end users (students, tutors, teachers), the tools developers (educational sw and hw manufacturers, AT companies), the disabled support services within universities. A better integration and communication will lead to concrete results to support scientific studies approaching.

Our purpose is to support the creation of an information network among European scientific universities, visually impaired students, scientific contents providers and hw&sw developers to empower fruition of scholarly material and courses by visually impaired students.