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Communication technology plays an ever increasing role in our daily lives. As users increasingly are always connected, this allows for new business activities and inter-human information exchange. However, currently available devices and interaction technologies only aim at non-impaired people. The special needs of handicapped people are mostly ignored, which excludes this special group from the Information Society and from business life. The exclusion also discriminates this group severely in training or education and thus imposes a long-term negative effect for their integration in work life.

Hence, CoVIP aims to offer net-based collaboration to support young handicapped people during the years of school-oriented education. The main goal is to avoid their isolation by giving them a possibility to interact with each other, either face-to-face or virtually over the network while solving given tasks (e.g. homework). Such collaborative work, talk, and communication cannot be implemented without additional supportive tools.

This requires the development of new interaction devices and/or an improved interface design to ensure the involvement of visually impaired users in such collaborative tasks. The new kinds of interfaces we address are not restricted to direct interaction techniques but also allow for the translation of meta-information. While such translation techniques are one criterion for efficient collaboration, the usage of large display interactive surfaces to present content efficiently, is another one. Hence, novel forms of interaction paired with innovative display and sensor technology will form the basis for a net-based supervision of the user group we target. Finally, we examine how new services can be built upon this technology for the future society.