The Ministry of Digital Transformation, on January 16, 2025, organized a public hearing on the Draft Law on Accessibility of Websites and Mobile Applications of Public Sector Institutions. At the public hearing, Minister Stefan Andonovski emphasized the Government’s goal of creating a fully inclusive digital society. The law stems from EU Directive 2016/2102 and provides for comprehensive measures to ensure accessibility, including easy and understandable accessibility to content, operability of the interface and sustainability of the technical implementation.
The public hearing was attended by representatives from state institutions, the non-governmental sector, international organizations and the academic community, demonstrating the importance of this legislation for Macedonian society. FEEIT was represented by prof. Branislav Gerazov, who also participated in the working group for the preparation of the draft law. He saluted the efforts made by the Ministry and the Government in the adoption of this important law. He further highlighted FEEIT’s commitment to promoting inclusiveness in education and society, through the inclusion of Universal Design in curricula, and especially through the implementation of a series of student projects in the field of assistive technologies, in cooperation with the Association for Assistive Technologies “Open the Windows”. He also indicated FEEIT’s readiness to make its resources and expertise available in the process of finalizing the draft law and its future implementation.
FEEIT fosters areas that are key in the design and implementation of assistive devices: electrical engineering, electronics, sensors, microcontrollers, speech, image, and biomedical signal processing, as well as the development of software applications and systems. Some of the projects that FEEIT’s students have implemented include: prototype obstacle detection systems for the blind, eye-gaze based wheelchair control, sign language synthesis, as well as the assistive communication application Govorko. With the support of UNICEF, FEEIT’s Speech Group participated in the localization of the Cboard communicator to Macedonian and Albanian, for which purpose it developed a new voice for speech synthesis in Macedonian – Suze.
