Little background

As a Translator and an Interpreter by university education, I cannot stop myself from analyzing words, hidden meanings, and miscellaneous definitions. It happens when I think, write, or talk in all my languages, including English, which joined Croatian, Italian, and Spanish in day-to-day communication at my first job, as an Erasmus+ trainee at ONCE Foundation.

There, for the first time, I got familiarized with Erasmus+ KA210-ADU projects, participated in writing and editing project proposals, and found out I completely adore playing with words, also on paper. Well, to be more precise, on screen.

Taking upon the Erasmus+ project KISS: Intro 2 AT 4 VIPs as a Project Manager at CABPS, I instantly fell in love with the project acronym, which real meaning I am planning to discover with you today.

Let us start with a KISS 

A word and act expressing affection, tenderness, passion, and respect. Sometimes overused, and other times misused. However, if you observe it as an abbreviation, it might pop into your mind as a design principle, well-known as "Keep it simple, stupid."

 This principle also exists in two other variations, both delivering the same message: "Keep it simple and straightforward" and "Keep it short and simple", with the latter being the correct solution of the first part of our equation.

Intro

What follows is the Intro, an abbreviation with a more intuitive meaning. Standing for "introduction", it has widespread and informal usage as an initial part of a song, so it won't take us long to jump to the next part of our equation.

2 and 4

Numbers 2 and 4, soundalike prepositions, recall my memories of my primary school English textbook, where I first saw the curious SMS codes written in casual and informal English. After 20 years, it is still fun to decode meanings!

AT, or not…

If you also enjoy playing detective, here comes a nice mystery for you! AT would have seemed like a preposition if only it hadn't been written in caps… That way, it must be an abbreviation, so what options do we have? 

Well, there are more than a hundred concepts AT as an acronym can refer to, so I suggest exploring whom AT is intended for. 

4 VIPs

And AT is intended for VIPs. Although visually impaired, as well as sighted persons, can be very important, interesting, ignorant, impossible, irritating, impatient, intelligent, idiotic, inspirational, and impressive persons, the CABPS (County Association of the Blind of Split) carries out this project to help its main target group, that is, all VIPs, the visually impaired persons.

What do VIPs use AT 4? 

AT as Assistive Technology, in the case of our VIPs, stands for a piece of equipment, software program, or product system that is used to increase, maintain, improve, or substitute their functional vision capabilities. 

Was your guess right?

Finally, we have the result of our equation: Keep it Short and Simple: Introduction to Assistive Technology for Visually Impaired Persons.

What's next?

Now that we uncovered the magic of copywriting, in the next blog, we will explore together the term assistive technology and the short and simple ways CABPS, jointly with La Brújula, Formación inclusiva, and Medobčinsko društvo slepih in slabovidnih Kranj, will introduce it to our target VIPs.

"This project is co-funded with the support of the European Commission under the reference number: 2023-1-HR01-KA210-ADU-000160133. The information and views set out in this blog are those of the authors(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the European Commission. Neither the European Union institutions not any person acting on their behalf may be held responsible for the use which may be made of the information contained there in."