About the Karten CTEC Centre.
The Karten CTEC centre has been set up due to the generosity of the Karten Charitable Trust. The centre aims to provide training focussed around IT which will enrich the lives of disabled people. This training may help them to access the job market or may enhance their opportunities to participate in other areas of life.
The ground floor, of what is an old building, has been altered to allow wheelchair access throughout and the layout has been designed to facilitate movement of sight impaired students. There are:
- Two height adjustable desks
- A variety of types of seating to meet individual need
- Four machines equipped with JAWS (software which reads the contents of the screen to the user)
- Four 21" monitors
Other adaptive devices include, voice recognition software, cordless keyboards, large keyboards, tracker balls, Braille printer and graphics tablet. The funding from the Karten Charitable Trust enables us to continue to expand these resources as individual needs arise. The staff at the centre are experienced in meeting the needs of disabled students and adjustments are made to operating systems to deal with individual needs, for instance by adapting the responsiveness of the mouse/keyboard.
Because of the nature of the building the activity of the centre is split between two floors but it is important to remember that this is not our final location. It is planned that as the Arkwright Mill complex develops so the centre will move to a location within the main site which will be on one level only. The facilities available will therefore continue to improve.
The location as a part of the Arkwright Mill and the Derwent Valley Heritage Site is significant for the local community in terms of placing the modern world at the centre of an old world, and for our students because it joins us to a developing commercial environment.
As a Training Club the centre is able to offer an ever-widening curriculum supporting the University's development of e-learning and its commitment to bringing learning in all its forms to all areas of Derbyshire. This link to the training clubs is not new since for some time the Training Clubs provided work placements for EDIT students.
The Karten Charitable Trust was founded in 1980 as a grant making trust. Until 1996 it based its activities upon awarding scholarships to allow people to access Higher Education. In July 1997 this activity widened to enabling different kinds of IT training and the first Karten Centre was opened; there are now 48 centres in the UK and 5 in Israel. All of the centres have been established by other charities who because of the Karten link are now committed to working together. It is anticipated that the number of centres will rise to 70 by 2005. The Karten Centres are varied in their specialisms and serve a wide range of disabilities.