The U.S. Department of Justice said Wednesday that Chicago has violated the Americans With Disabilities Act for its lack of special crossing signals for blind and sight-compromised pedestrians.
Accessible pedestrian signals provide pedestrians with safe-crossing information in a non-visual format, such as audible tones, speech messages and vibrating surfaces.
The ruling stems from a disability discrimination lawsuit filed in late 2019 by the American Council of the Blind of Metropolitan Chicago and three visually disabled individuals. The suit alleged that the city violated disabled pedestrians’ civil rights at both the state and federal level by not taking blind people’s safety into account when planning walkways and signals.
Chicago has known of the shortfall since 2006, the DOJ said. Fifteen of the 2,800 intersections were equipped with cues for sighted people when the department moved to intervene in 2021 — just 1%. Things have barely improved since, the feds said Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge Elaine E. Bucklo ruled in favor of the government and the private plaintiffs on March 31 and held the city in violation of the ADA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act.
The court found that the city had provided accessible pedestrian signals at a “miniscule portion of the whole.”
Chicago failed “to provide ‘meaningful access’ to its network of existing facilities and to ensure that newly constructed signals are designed and constructed in such a manner as to be ‘readily accessible’ by blind individuals,” Bucklo ruled.
“Federal law offers people with visual disabilities the promise of full participation in community life, and safely navigating city streets is a critical part of that,” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “We will continue pushing for a remedy that fully addresses the discrimination faced by blind people in Chicago.”
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