@Science: a network about science accessibility for university students

At present, visually impaired students are strongly discouraged to attend university scientific studies, especially because of the lack of scientific resources fully accessible through assistive technologies, the difficulty to attend scientific university lectures based on explanations employing transparencies with mathematical expressions as well as graphical representations and the tools to work on mathematical expressions, which are often partially usable or incomplete for advanced subjects. Furthermore, the variety all over Europe of national braille codes to represent mathematical expressions and the language dependence of audio books recorded by human readers make difficult a cross country exchange of knowledge and resources. Some universities have been working on the improvement of assistive technologies in science learning for many years and they have collected best experiences, tools, accessible scientific resources and effective and efficient methods. Unfortunately, up to now many of these best practices and educational resources haven't got widespread all over Europe. In order to share knowledge among universities about science accessibility by visually impaired people and to produce guidelines and to document best practices, the @Science thematic network was established. It is supported for two years by the European Union eContent- Plus Programme. It involves six founding members from five European countries: Italy, Austria, Slovakia, Belgium and France. In the project lifetime, collaboration actions will be undertaken so as to involve in the thematic network other universities, software and hardware manufacturers, publishers, associations for visually impaired persons and students themselves. In so doing, each group will contribute with its experience and will gain knowledge from other experiences. Moreover, the guidelines and best practices will be the result of a two years exchange of knowledge among experts and end users. At first, this paper will introduce the main barriers which affect blind students in going through scientific studies. Then, it will present the objectives and the methodology of the @Science network

Sonification of guidance data during road crossing for people with visual impairments or blindness

In the last years several solutions were proposed to support people with visual impairments or blindness during road crossing. These solutions focus on computer vision techniques for recognizing pedestrian crosswalks and computing their relative position from the user. Instead, this contribution addresses a different problem; the design of an auditory interface that can effectively guide the user during road crossing. Two original auditory guiding modes based on data sonification are presented and compared with a guiding mode based on speech messages. Experimental evaluation shows that there is no guiding mode that is best suited for all test subjects. The average time to align and cross is not significantly different among the three guiding modes, and test subjects distribute their preferences for the best guiding mode almost uniformly among the three solutions. From the experiments it also emerges that higher effort is necessary for decoding the sonified instructions if compared to the speech instructions, and that test subjects require frequent `hints' (in the form of speech messages). Despite this, more than 2/3 of test subjects prefer one of the two guiding modes based on sonification. There are two main reasons for this: firstly, with speech messages it is harder to hear the sound of the environment, and secondly sonified messages convey information about the "quantity" of the expected movement

Improving the regeneration of skeletal muscle

Several pathological conditions of the skeletal muscle (myopathies, dystrophies and age-related atrophy) represent a burden for health care system. Satellite cells are postnatal resident myogenic precursors present in the skeletal muscles throughout the entire lifespan. The identification of novel therapeutic strategies able to enhance their regenerative capacity is one of the most promising tools to compensate muscle degeneration and to restore functional muscle performance in patients and elderly. Our research activity is aiming to contribute to this crucial topic

The microtransplantation technique: a simple ad useful approach to study receptors transplanted into xenopus oocytes

Neuroreceptors are involved in many neurological diseases and represent the preferential target for the pharmacological treatments. Thus functional studies of their activity, by the use of electrophysiological techniques, are a fundament approach to understand not only the pathological mechanism of many neurological diseases but also the mechanism of action of potential drugs. Unfortunately, this cannot be applied for studying the receptor activity in all the human tissues. The option is the use of animal models, however they often resemble only some of the neurological diseases in human. In addition, adult or old animals are not always suitable for electrophysiological studies of age-related diseases. Here, we propose the microtransplantation technique as a novel and useful method to study receptors in humans and, more in general, in adult animals

μGraph: Haptic Exploration and Editing of 3D Chemical Diagrams

People with visual impairments or blindness (VIB) encounter diffculties in exploring graphical representations that are widely used for the study of STEM subjects. In particular, graphs are used to represent many different scientifc notations: fowcharts, automata, cognitive maps, and more. Among these, structural chemical formulae are characterized by a complex, often 3-dimensional structure, which makes them hard to access and author with traditional assistive tools. We propose \ub5Graph, a multimodal system that combines haptic and speech feedback to enable people with VIB to explore and edit structural chemical formulae. Two main contributions are presented: (i) a novel, non-visual interaction paradigm for exploring graphs and its implementation in the \ub5Graph system, and (ii) an extensive evaluation of the proposed system with 10 participants with VIB showing that \ub5Graph is thoroughly accessible and that the haptic feedback enhances understanding of the geometric properties of a graph

TACTILE GRAPHICS WITH MATHEMATICA

Tactile diagrams require considering specific features like resolution, size, density and even fonts to be perceived properly. Mathematica, as a powerful tool, provides integrated environment for technical computing, and has introduced a new generation of mathematical and algebraic capabilities. By the way, by default it does not respect the features necessary for graphs to be drawn to be fully tactile perceivable. In this paper, we have studied different aspects of graphing with the package and have investigated a criterion regarding the density feature for the drawn graphs to be judged how far are tactile perceivable

WordMelodies: supporting children with visual impairment in learning literacy

We present WordMelodies, an inclusive, cross platform, mobile app that supports children with visual impairments in the acquisition of basic literacy skills through 8 different exercises. WordMelodies has been designed and evaluated by three domain experts in assistive technologies and education for children with visual impairments. After three design and evaluation iterations the app is fully accessible, except for one limitation of the cross platform development toolkit used

COMPOSITE PHOTOCATALYTIC MATERIALS FOR SOLAR ENERGY CONVERSION AND ENVIRONMENTAL APPLICATIONS

The PhD project focused on the synthesis, characterisation and testing of metal modified TiO2 powders and thin WO3 films for solar energy conversion and photocatalytic oxidation reactions. In the first part, two industrial processes, i.e. Flame Spray Pyrolysis and Magnetron Sputtering, were employed to modify TiO2 powders with Cu and/or Pt nanoparticles. These photocatalysts were tested in the methanol photosteam reforming reaction for hydrogen production. The most promising materials were further tested in the same reaction at different temperatures to observe the effect of heat over photoactivity and selectivity. In addition, ME-XAS analyses were performed to better understand the behaviour of metal nanoparticles over TiO2 under operando conditions. In the second part, WO3 films were synthesised by sputtering techniques and the effect of several deposition parameters, such as total pressure, O2 partial pressure, applied power, number of deposited layers, were investigated by means of photo-electrochemical techniques