22.03.2016 //
A website developed by our grantee Civic Alliance for Social Inclusion to help children with autism overcome the barriers of speech has registered big success.
As a lifelong condition that affects thousands of people in Serbia, autism is not well-understood and people with autism in the country are often shun.
A father of a child with autism has thus decided to make a difference. He developed online games for his children to overcome barriers of speech and try to lead full and meaningful lives as an integral part of society. The games turned out to be a success so he started sharing them on social media so other parents of children with autism can use it. Since that was still a small circle of friends, the Embassy supported the Civic Alliance for Social Inclusion from Pozega, Western Serbia, to create a website called Ucimo reci (Learning words) based on this model.
Launched in April 2015, the website has dozens of educational games, but also videos, books and other useful material one can download and print. The site also contains links to relevant institutions, organisations and associations of people to whom one can turn for help.
According to Goran Jordovic from the Alliance, the number of unique visits has been very big since the beginning and includes people from all over the world. “We were all shocked by the fact that in 2015 the site had a total bandwidth of 2490GB. We are proud that our website achieved this success for just one year,” he says. Now they are planning to improve it and make it fully available on all mobile platforms.
Besides the Civic Alliance for Social Inclusion, the Embassy has been supporting different project aimed to increasing the quality of lives of autistic people and the lives of their families. One of the latest was the first inclusive musical “Magical Journey”, which follows six young artists with autism and a girl with hearing impairment on their first singing tour in Macedonia.
