We would like to express our sincere thanks for the past few weeks of shared cooperation at the international and local levels and for the interest shown by visitors and participants.
Based on our two trips to France (north tour and south tour) in April 2025, we gathered a wealth of input on the topic of inclusion and accessibility and, building on this, established a mutual exchange between France and Germany, whose input/output comes from open workshops and is intended for open workshops and the general public.
In the penultimate week of June, Axel Just from Erlangen and Mathieu Rietman from the ILDYS Foundation visited us. The focus was on establishing cooperation between the associations and the ForceWheel project—a motorization kit for non-electric wheelchairs. Over the summer, we agreed to turn ForceWheel, which has been around for many years and has been successfully tested by wheelchair users, into an open source hardware project. Among other things, all parts and assemblies were photographed, source files and instructions were exchanged, a demo kit was left behind by Mathieu in Germany (currently with Axel!), and the entire project was presented to the public as part of Makers United. We are currently working together to make all necessary files and information available in the form of a Codeberg Git repository, with the goal of completion by the end of the year. It will contain everything needed to reproduce ForceWheel correctly and to a high standard of quality, ideally enabling greater independence from commercial suppliers who, as we have learned through our activities, often take months to deliver to those in need.
Our lecture evening and subsequent workshop from July 18 to 21 were equally successful for us. In mid-June, Hugues Aubin from la fabrique in Janzé near Rennes visited us. Hugues and his colleague Stéphane Godin are two key figures behind the open source project BrailleRAP—a machine and software that can punch text and graphics into tactile Braille patterns.
On Thursday evening, we had around 25 guests at our information evening in the Stadtwirtschaft event hall. Speakers included Amel Garcia, Hugues Aubin, Babette Sperling, and Mario Voigt. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the translators (including Marina Klavina) who helped with the translation from French to German and English to German.
The presentation slides can be downloaded here:
The subsequent practical workshop on building our own machine in the FabLab resulted in a very well-adjusted BrailleRAP XL, which we all tried out right away. Nearly 10 people were involved in the DIY project or attended as interested visitors over the three days. Due to the fact that we made a mistake in the machine housing during our first attempt, which cost us a lot of time, only one of the two planned machines was completed. We still have the hardware to build a second device and will offer a follow-up workshop at a suitable time to complete the second device.
We have reserved a dedicated laptop for BrailleRAP, which is intended solely for use with this machine. This allows us to preconfigure specific adjustments such as screen magnification, speech-to-text, and other aids that may confuse other users of the device and facilitate access. We would like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to Computertruhe e.V. base in Chemnitz, which recently provided us with a substantial amount of hardware for our association.
The objectives of our workshop are to bring together people from different backgrounds, acquire new knowledge, raise awareness of Braille and open source, and build functional equipment to produce Braille punches ourselves—cost-effectively and directly. We use the device we have now built at events as a demonstrator to inspire and raise awareness – it will also be used at MakerFaire Hannover, among other places. We are also happy to lend it to interested individuals and initiatives so that they can achieve things that were not previously possible.
The workshop is supported by the Makers, Business & Arts project of the European Capital of Culture Chemnitz 2025. This measure is co-financed by tax funds on the basis of the budget adopted by the Saxon State Parliament, by federal funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, as well as funds from the City of Chemnitz.
The project “Creating inclusive future ourselves!” by Stadtfabrikanten e.V. is supported by Deutsch-Französischen Bürgerfonds.
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