Blind people are entitled to a white cane by law, but there are none in Macedonia: the state doesn't even know how many blind people it has

On 15 October, International White Cane Day, blind and partially sighted people came to parliament and delivered the most absurd sentence of the year: on White Cane Day, the white cane itself isn't available to them. "By law we're entitled to a cane, but we'd have to get it in Macedonia. There aren't any in Macedonia," said Vesna and Zoran, a married couple who have lived without sight for three decades.

And the state doesn't even know how many people are actually waiting for that cane. It's estimated that Macedonia has between four and ten thousand blind and partially sighted people - a range of a full six thousand people, because a state register still hasn't been set up. More than 2,500 are members of the National Union of the Blind, which works through 18 local associations. The rest, in practice, don't exist on paper.

A panel every year, for blindness that doesn't go away

The list of problems laid out before MPs is long and specific. There aren't enough tactile paths or working audible traffic signals, and pavements are taken over by cars. People who are permanently blind have to go before a panel every year to renew their right to care allowance, and on top of the specialist's report they're asked for a Barthel index, for which, they say, they pay around 570 denars. As if blindness might clear up by next year.

Personal assistance is a story of its own. Vesna has gone through six personal assistants so far, because, she says, they have no regulated employment status, health insurance or pension contributions. The assistant leaves, and the blind person is left without the support they had just got used to. In Kičevo, meanwhile, the local association of the blind has had no space to meet since 2019, and one member says a blind person gets 10,000 denars a month - a sum that, he says, doesn't even cover the electricity and water bills.

The demands are specific, the responses are generic

Blind people are asking the Health Insurance Fund to simplify access to white canes and other aids, to restore the right to a companion during hospital treatment and rehabilitation, to bring back discounted transport, to separate personal assistance into its own category, and to improve disability allowance. They're also asking for ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty, which eases access to books in formats accessible to visually impaired people, and for digital accessibility to be "the rule, not the exception" - since many public digital platforms still don't meet the standards.

MP Nikola Micevski, chair of the Inter-Party Parliamentary Group for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, said accessibility "is not an extra privilege or a luxury, but a basic precondition" for human rights. From the authorities came the familiar "efforts are being made". Sounds nice. But when the state can't even provide the cane it owes a blind person by law, how long will audible signals, tactile paths and a register take?