Access of disabled people to engineering education

Abstract

The article deals with the integration of disabled people into engineering education through widening access. Each country has a fraction of the population that face some obstacles in entering, participating, gaining or completing education. People with disabilities acknowledge their disabilities at enrolment and request special services for access to informational sources. Changing social and economic conditions in Central and Eastern Europe have had a profound impact on the place of the disabled people in society. For a long time, society looked upon the disabled as helpless people who could not adapt to the surrounding environment by themselves. For many years, technical universities were not hospitable to disabled people’s needs. The opinion prevailed that the best education choice for disabled people was the humanities. Following European trends in higher education, the Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Vilnius, Lithuania, recently included certain measures concerning access for disabled people into the University’s development plan for the social integration of disabled people into society. It is important to take their needs into consideration, the opportunities available and the obstacles that prevent disabled people from fulfilling their needs.