Eikholt Conference 2025 Orientation and Mobility - The Way Forward

Do you meet people with visual and hearing impairments? Do you and they need to know about developments in orientation and mobility? What can we learn from sharing experiences? The Eikholt conference aims to highlight new knowledge and showcase opportunities in orientation and mobility.

Who is the conference for?

The Eikholt conference is aimed at vision and mobility educators, vision and hearing contacts in municipalities, staff in kindergartens, schools and adult education, audiographers, opticians, occupational therapists and others who work with rehabilitation and have an interest in vision, hearing and mobility training. The conference is open to all.

Time and place

Time: 27 - 28 August 2025

Location: Physically at Eikholt - there will be no streaming this time. We make recordings of lectures we get permission to share afterwards.

Language: Norwegian/English/Swedish/Norwegian Sign Language

Deadline for enrolment: 15 August.

What is orientation and mobility? 

Orientation is about knowing where you are in relation to your surroundings. Mobility means movement. When orientating and moving from one place to another, there are three questions you need to consider: 

• Where am I?
• Where am I going?
• How do I get there?

Research shows that orientation and mobility are issues that many people with combined visual and hearing impairments are concerned about, and it is a field that places great demands on those who work professionally in this area. Hearing, the tactile sense and sight must be used differently to get from A to Z. The Eikholt Conference has a tradition of presenting new research, projects, technology and experiences from practical fields and everyday life.

Program

You can download the programme here: Programme Eikholt conference 2025

If you want the programme sent in a different format, get in touch with us

Lecturers

Here you'll find a presentation of the lecturers, you can look forward to it!

Marius Langeland Myklebust

Marius Langeland Myklebust is a trained muscle therapist and massage therapist. He has experience from interdisciplinary clinics, and now works at GPS Health in Haugesund.

Marius was born blind with progressive hearing loss from an early age. Throughout his life, he has been keen to use his resources on strategies that provide opportunities. To achieve this, he also puts into words what he finds challenging.

His presentation at the conference "Travelling with dual sensory loss" provides an insight into the challenges he has faced and his choice of strategies for orientation and mobility. He does this with a good dose of self-irony and humour.

Severine Kas

"Severine knew from a young age that she wanted to become an architect.  

From the age of 28 till 38 she worked with great passion for ten years as an architect, focusing on projects in healthcare, education, and residential housing. At the age of 23, she was diagnosed with the progressive Usher syndrome, which gradually impaired her vision and hearing.  

While it was difficult to let go of her career as an architect, her curiosity and desire to explore new skills opened new doors. She became a change facilitator at Bartiméus, where she gained a deeper understanding of the organisation and the world of visual and auditory accessibility. 

As a change facilitator and creative driver at Bartiméus, she contributed to the establishment of an expertise centre for accessibility. The focus was not just on the individual, but also on society and the built environment. How can we shape the physical world to ensure as few people as possible are excluded? This is the essence of Universal Design. 

For the past ten years, Severine has been working at Stichting Accessibility, part of Bartiméus, as an accessibility consultant. She advises museums and municipalities and develops knowledge on standards and visual accessibility-knowledge that is still lacking to truly design the built environment universally. Giving lectures in education and building sector gives her a lot of energy. 

Her unique combination of architectural expertise and personal experience as a deafblind woman makes her a strong advocate for universal design, with a mission to create an inclusive and accessible world for everyone." 

Rolf Lund

Rolf Lund is a researcher at Eikholt. He is a trained specialist in educational psychological counselling and visual education. He has previously worked at an Assistive Technology Centre, as a teacher in schools and as head of the PP service with responsibility for visual and audio educational services.

Rolf has also been CEO of his own assistive technology company, a researcher at SINTEF and the Work Research Institute, and an assistant professor at the Institute of Special Needs Education at the University of Oslo. 

His research focuses on user participation and how the physical environment affects the opportunities for social participation for people with deafblindness. 

In collaboration with Severinè Kas, Rolf presents Universal Design. About how "Architecture for all senses" can ensure accessibility to the public environment for people with combined visual and hearing impairment/deafblindness 

Read more about the project here: Architecture for all the senses

Arne Kjeldstad

Emy Quick

Emy Hurtig is an occupational therapist and vision educator working in Sweden at the National Knowledge Centre for Deafblind Issues (Nkcdb). In addition to her work at the knowledge centre, she also meets people with deafblindness in clinical activities in southern Sweden. In her work, she helps deafblind people with visual aids, activity balance, orientation and mobility.

Emy has been working with people with deafblindness for 6 years. In the spring of 2023, she took a master's degree in occupational therapy, where she wrote a thesis on "Visual educators' experiences of introducing and training orientation and movement with people with deafblindness". Based on the thesis, a guide was produced in January 2025 on how orientation and movement can be adapted to people with deafblindness. These two works will be the starting point for her presentation at the conference.

Anne-May Førland

Anne-May is an audiographer with a bachelor's degree in audiology. In the spring of 2025, she will complete her master's degree in clinical health science and audiology from NTNU in Trondheim. Her master's thesis "Mobility programme in hearing aids for people with combined visual and hearing impairment/deafblindnesst" explores how hearing aids can be adjusted to work best for deafblind people outdoors in situations where they need to orientate themselves using their hearing.  

Anne-May keeps up to date with new research and is interested in genetics, hearing, orientation and mobility, directional hearing, echolocation and hearing rehabilitation. At Eikholt, she is responsible for individual hearing courses, introductory courses and group courses " 

At the conference, she will give two presentations, one on The role of hearing in orientation and mobility and one about Hearing aids customised to hear ambient sound. Anne May is a speaker with a lot of knowledge in the field of hearing and gives engaging presentations.  

Egil Edwin

Egil Edwin is a trained visual educator as well as a mobility and ADL teacher. He has extensive experience of teaching the visually impaired across various disciplines.

He has previously worked at the Assistive Technology Centre in Oslo and Akershus and Huseby Competence Centre. He is currently employed by the consulting company Ablecon AS, where he also participates in the development of assistive technology for the visually impaired.

For several years, he has collaborated with Eikholt, the national resource centre for deafblind people, where he has contributed with IT-related training, Braille training and mobility training for people with combined visual and hearing impairments. At the conference, he will address the following topics Mobility - training for combined visual and hearing impairment/deafblindness. Route learning and labelling. 

Fereshteh Halimi

Fereshteh is a Senior Advisor within vision and mobility. She has a master's degree in economics and development. She has later taken further education in human rights, pedagogy and visual pedagogy. Her interests are technology and the opportunities it creates for people with visual and hearing impairments.  

Fereshteh has extensive experience as a visual educator from both adult education and primary school, with a focus on punctual education and ICT.

At the conference, she and John Ulriksen will give a presentation on Technology and mobility, opportunities and limitations and one about Mobility and technology - demonstration of some technical aids. 

John Ulriksen

John is a Senior Advisor within ICT. He is educated in programming, maths and languages. He has extensive experience of teaching in the field of ICT. John enjoys using pedagogy as an introduction to technology and everyday mastery for those he meets. He specialises in everyday technology, assistive technology and software for the blind and severely visually impaired. He is particularly keen to find opportunities with ICT for people who need tactile communication and guidance. 

At the conference, together with Fereshteh Halimi, he will give a presentation on Technology and mobility, opportunities and limitations  and one about Mobility and technology - demonstration of some technical aids.

Thomas Tvedt

Thomas Tvedt is a counsellor in the vision department at Statped. Here he works with teaching for both young people and adults. Thomas, who was born blind, is a certified instructor in echolocation (socio-perceptual navigation) by American Daniel Kish. Thomas has on several occasions contributed to teaching and projects within orientation and mobility at Eikholt, and we are happy to have him back at this year's conference. This time he will give a presentation with the intriguing title A holistic approach to mobility - it's mindfulness that keeps you alive! He will talk about attention as an overarching perspective in the context of mobility, as well as specific techniques and tools, such as echolocation.

Thomas draws on his experience of counselling students, but also on his own experience of being blind in a world populated by sighted people.

Prices and registration

• Conference fee: 2090,- includes lunch and refreshments on both days
• Single room 1550,- per room per night, including breakfast
• Double room 2150,- per room per night, including breakfast
• Dinner on the evening of 27 August: 690,-

Do you have any questions?

If you have questions about accommodation or practical questions related to travelling to and from, please contact our switchboard on telephone 456 14 404 or email: post@eikholt.no
 
If you have any questions about the programme or participation, please contact Tanja Teigum by email: tanja.teigum@eikholt.no
 
Questions related to invoicing can be directed to Mona Borrmann by email: mona.borrmann@eikholt.no

Presentation and recordings from previous Eikholt conferences

We have collected presentations and recordings from previous Eikholt conferences under the Knowledge Vault. You can find this here:

Conferences and webinars Archive - Eikholt

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