Study Centre for the Visually Impaired

The Study Centre for Visually Impaired Persons (SZS) supports people with visual perception impairments and is a unique institution of its kind in Germany and a world leader in this field. The SZS particularly supports blind and visually impaired students in their studies at KIT. It advises students, prepares teaching materials prepared with Braille and " touchable" tactile graphics and improves orientation on campus and the accessibility of buildings. The study center also plays a pioneering role in research: The head of the SZS, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Rainer Stiefelhagen, is researching with his working group Computer Systems for Visually Impaired Students - a professorship in this field that is unique in Germany.

Taktiler Drucker facilitates joint learning

In many technical, scientific and business fields, large amounts of data are processed, interpreted and often visually displayed. Students must therefore be able to understand and interpret diagrams and the visual information they contain. To make diagrams accessible to visually impaired students, they can be displayed as tactile graphics using special printers.

Thanks to the renewed commitment of the Reinhard Frank Foundation, the Study Center for the Visually Impaired was able to purchase a tactile printer that raised graphic elements such as mathematical curves, making them palpable to the fingers. In addition, text in Braille is printed on the graphics. In order to facilitate joint learning with sighted people, the graphics are displayed in color and additionally provided with normal font.

Wir danken der Reinhard-Frank-Stiftung für ihr Engagement!

Join in with a donation for blind and visually impaired students!

Further Information:

SZS, KIT
Screen reader in use (Photo: SZS, KIT)