ISOC Bosnia and Herzegovina's Barrier-Free Internet Programme for Blind Users

Since 2021 the Internet Society Bosnia and Herzegovina Chapter has run a sequence of Beyond the Net-funded projects training blind and visually impaired residents in internet use. Its inaugural Beyond the Net Large grant, “Enhancing the Barrier-Free Internet through Blind People Empowerment” (2021-2022), gave nine participants — including first-time computer user Mufida Balta of Breza — laptops and hands-on instruction in screen readers and web navigation from lead trainer Hamdo Kentra, who is himself blind.
The chapter followed up with “Internet as a Tool for Amplifying the Weak and Silent Voices of Persons with Disabilities,” an internet-journalism training programme that enrolled at least eleven further participants between July 2023 and June 2024 — among them Toni Pavić of Livno — each receiving a laptop and producing published audio/video content; ten of these participants were later featured together in a joint video release in May 2024. The chapter also held a Global Accessibility Awareness Day panel in Tuzla on 16 May 2024 with the Association of Visually Impaired Citizens Tuzla, and launched a further, 2026-dated project on digital safety and online protection for people with disabilities.
Evidence is self-documented by the implementing chapter — independently corroborated by the Internet Society's global accessibility blog, which confirms the chapter “organized Internet safety training for visually impaired students” — rather than externally evaluated, and the cumulative cohort of roughly twenty participants across multiple cycles remains a demonstration-scale programme relative to Bosnia and Herzegovina's blind and visually impaired population.

Read the full analysis: https://internetsociety.ba/en/author/urednik/page/2/