VIP Group

How we support the Visually Impaired

Horden Youth and Community Centre is dedicated to the support and improvement in the lives of the local community. As an identified shortcoming in the support offered to blind and visually impaired persons in East Durham, the VIP (Visually Impaired Persons) Group was formed. With the assistance of Microsoft Corporation, Social Care Institute for Excellence and the East Durham Area Action Partnership, we have managed to equip the centre with the equipment necessary to train these students and their carers in the use of modern technology, thus helping to improve their communications and their life styles. We are currently the only community centre in County Durham to offer such a facility.

Our Intentions

Further work is still being carried out. The group intends by practical and moral support to allow all users equal access to modern technology.

Services

At present, we can offer full braille printing and text conversion using Dolphin Easy Converter to change a Microsoft Word document into braille, MP3 or PDF (Adobe Reader) formats.

We also supply one-to-one tuition in the use of Dolphin Guide and SupaNova, for vision-impaired clients who are competent at using a keyboard. These programs contain Magnifier, speech feedback for documents and multimedia access including the internet. We can also teach those who are not so dextrous in keyboard use using hands-free software. We also offer aids for hearing and speech impairment, using text-to-speech and speech-to-text applications.

Further work is being carried out to widen the existing software platforms. We are also trialling beta programs for Dolphin and iview, so if you would like to get involved with this, please get in touch with Denis Allison via our Contact page, at our usual number, or leave your details with us and he will get back to you!

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