The Workshop on Assistive Technologies organized by FEEIT FabLab was held at INNOFEIT on Friday, March 14, 2025. A number of renowned experts in this field from Macedonia participated in the workshop. First, Toni Bachvarovski, President of the Association for Assistive Technologies “Open the Windows”, spoke about the basics of assistive technologies and their historical development and latest achievements. He also addressed the importance of universal design as a philosophy of designing new solutions with built-in accessibility in order to make them usable by as many users as possible.
Danche Todorovska, special educator at “Open the Windows”, then presented the penetration of assistive technologies in Macedonia, focusing on the work of the Association on their promotion in the Macedonian school system and the education of teachers enabling them to work with these technologies. Additionally, she showed a series of case-studies on how assistive technologies enable the inclusion of children with various types of disabilities.
In the second part of the workshop, Kristijan Lazarev, a professor at the State School for Visually Impaired Children and Youth “Dimitar Vlahov” and a representative of the Association for Accessibility and Inclusion (API), gave a presentation. He spoke about the use of assistive technology to support children in education, referring specifically to assistive technologies designed for the digital inclusion of the blind and visually impaired. He practically demonstrated the work of a Braille monitor, a screen reader and the method used for writing in Braille on a smartphone.
In addition, Vanessa Lazarova, also from API, and a master’s student at FEEIT, spoke about the importance of accessibility of digital platforms, the basic criteria used for its assessment and best practices for its implementation. In the practical demonstration, she showed how screen readers interpret the content of websites, highlighting good examples and pointing out pitfalls to avoid.
Finally, Branislav Gerazov spoke about the work of FEEIT students in the field of assistive technologies, presenting a series of successful student projects, some of which are in practical use by end users, such as the assistive keyboard and the Macedonian speech synthesis voice Suze (https://speech.feit.ukim.edu.mk/). Among the projects are prototype systems for obstacle detection for blind people, wheelchair control with gaze, sign language synthesis from input text, as well as the assistive communication application Govorko.
The workshop is supported by FEEIT FabLab and the Macedonian Section of IEEE through its departments: the Joint department for Signal Processing and Engineering in Medicine and Biology (SP/EMB), the Joint department for Electronic Devices, Instrumentation and Measurements, and Semiconductor Circuits (ED/IM/SSC), the student departments (SC37 and ED15), as well as the affinity group of IEEE life members (LM80077).
