The Center for the Blind in Israel - the umbrella organization of organizations working for people with blindness and visual impairments in Israel, filed yesterday, through Attorney Oron Schwartz, of the Schwartz-Narkis & Co. firm, a class action lawsuit with the Tel Aviv District Court for 31,000,000 shekels, against the public transportation companies Egged, Dan, Kavim and Afikim - for violating their obligations towards the population of people with blindness and visual impairments.
According to the lawsuit, this has resulted in a serious harm to their way of life.
The lawsuit states that public transportation lines "are an existential necessity for this public, 'the elixir of life,' and that they have no other way to get from place to place to fulfill their basic needs.".
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The lawsuit states that public transportation companies are violating their obligations under the law, and refers to cases in which the buses did not stop at the stations, or did not stop at the stations designated for them, or in which the buses stopped - but the emergency system did not work.
The lawsuit also states that as complaints about the lack of accessibility accumulated, the center's personnel began blindly collecting data to investigate the phenomenon and its extent. According to the lawsuit, 220 cases were documented for the purpose of the investigation, 134 of which were found to be inaccessible.
For Dan, 132 cases were recorded, of which 76 cases were considered inaccessible; for Egged, 43 cases were recorded, of which 26 cases were considered inaccessible; for Kavim, 25 cases were recorded, of which 19 cases were considered inaccessible; and for Afikim, 20 cases were recorded, of which 13 cases were considered inaccessible.
The filming took place over a period of about a year and 9 months, during which 7 filming sessions were filmed, from May 4, 2017 to February 3, 2019. The filming was carried out over a wide time period, covering various and varied time intervals from 7:00 AM to 4:24 PM.
In Israel, according to official data, there are currently 23,132 blind/visually impaired men and women living, and by law they are entitled to carry a blind certificate.
Of this group, about 10% are completely blind and cannot use their sense of sight at all, and among about 90% they have remnants of vision that may be useful for some tasks.
In addition to people known to be blind/visually impaired, it is estimated that there are another 100,000 people in Israel who have severe visual impairments, who are on the fringes of the legal definition of blindness.
Nati Bialystok-Cohen, CEO of the Center for the Blind: ""This is the struggle of the unseen and the invisible. Those who, despite all of society's efforts to correct, enforce, and bring their existence and needs to the forefront of consciousness, remain invisible. This is absurd.".
""Public transportation lines are an existential necessity for people with blindness and visual impairments. What seems trivial and obvious to a sighted person is a mountain of fate for another. The Center for the Blind will continue to work towards making public spaces accessible in order to enable people with blindness and visual impairments to live independent and normative lives.".
