MapAbility: strengthen the accessibility of HEIs to students with special needs
The ExchangeAbility International Team has been working intensively on the MapAbility project since September 2013, especially on the preparation and launching of the questionnaire aiming at gathering information on the actual situation inside European Higher Education Institutions. Furthermore, a website has been released and several partnerships signed with European network organisations dealing with students and people with special needs and disabilities. Different representatives of ESN have been participating to several conferences to present ExchangeAbility and MapAbility (e.g. EAIE in Istanbul, AHEAD conference in Dublin 2014, Annual General Meeting in Milano etc.).
A questionnaire mapping HEIs’ accessibility!
The questionnaire has been launched in January and has been disseminated to all the European universities where ESN network is present and not only. Until now we have mapped around 70 Universities and 230 University buildings and the submissions are continuing. The main goal of the questionnaire is to study and examine the accessibility of Higher Education Institutions and services provided to students with disabilities. The most important outcome of the project will be an online map of HEIs and information about their services and accessibility. The web-based tool will students with disabilities do choose the right destination for their period abroad.
Did your university already filled in the questionnaire? If not, you still have time to do so and help us in removing obstacles for students with disabilities. Click here to fill in. You can also fill it out if you don’t have an ESN section.
A great help for the project elaboration has been the support we received from our numerous partners Autism Europe, AHEAD - Association on higher education and Disability, EASPD European Association of Service Providers for Persons with Disabilities, EDF European Disability Forum, ENIL European Network on Independent Living, Jaccede.com - the interactive accessibility guide , UNICA- Network of Universities from the Capitals of Europe and European Economic and Social Committee. The partners have been actively supporting with the creation of the questionnaire as well as its dissemination.
A training and launching conference in May-June!
At the end of May a training and launching conference will be held in Brussels, which will be attended by national project coordinators, students involved in the project, partners of the project as well as important stakeholders in the area of inclusion of students with disabilities. More about the conference (link to the article about the conference).
Join the Erasmus Student Network in this mapping exercise and contribute to the future of more accessible universities in Europe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsI7vJ3SjH8
For more information please contact:
Monika Rešetar at [email protected] or Vasiliki Meletaki at [email protected]
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The Erasmus Student Network (ESN) is a non-profit international student organisation. Our mission is to represent international students, thus provide opportunities for cultural understanding and self-development under the principle of Students Helping Students.
We are 13.500 members from 452 local sections in 37 countries working on a volunteer base in Higher Education Institutions. We are offering services to 160.000 students.