Türkiye
participants
To raise awareness about the difficulties experienced by the visually impaired people. To show empathy towards them, learn to put ourselves in their shoes and not to judge them.
We had 8 volunteer Erasmus students for the project and had prepared 4 well-known paintings and 4 cities. All participants were blindfolded and each of them described his/her painting/city to the others with open eyes. After each session the students noted down their guesses. Then, we played two cartoons and they tried to guess which ones they were. At the end, the participant with the most points won an evil eye talisman (“nazar boncuğu”) souvenir. In this way we touched on the Culture Cause. It is also worth mentioning that in order to show the images we used a tablet computer instead of printed papers which contributed to the Environmental Sustainability Cause.
At the end of the project the participants realised what difficulties visually impaired experience and how do they feel in daily life. However, they found out that those people can also experience good emotions about beautiful things (paintings, city landscapes, etc.) with the help of description. We concluded that more audio materials should be published for visually challenged people.