Pupils from all four secondary schools in Veles will spend the next six months using a digital tool to map the institutions in their town that are not accessible to people with disabilities, to parents with prams, or to anyone who uses a mobility aid.

The project is called „Digital Green Access”, it is youth-led, and it is funded by the European Union. The motto is blunt: access to institutions is not a privilege, it is a basic human and civic right.

Now read the list of institutions that the Association of People with Cerebral Palsy and Other Disabilities names as inaccessible in Veles. The health insurance fund. The pension and disability insurance fund. The preventive pre-school health service. The Post Office. The Public Revenue Office. The Central Registry. The electronic hall and the ceremonial hall of the Municipality of Veles itself. The employment agency. The centre for social work.

That is not a list of private shops. That is literally the list of places a citizen goes to for a pension, a health card, social assistance, a job. Every one of them exists because the state has an obligation to the citizen - and every one of them, according to this association, is closed to a portion of those citizens.

The barriers are not only stairs

Daliborka Zlateva from the association puts it plainly: members say that if they set out through town in a wheelchair, there is almost nowhere they can actually reach. Traffic lights with no audio signal. Not a single public health facility has a sign language interpreter - which means a person with hearing loss has to bring a family member along in order to talk to their own doctor. No bank offers that service either, and plenty of disabled people are employed and need a bank. Institutions carry no information in Braille. Public transport is not accessible, and the kerbs at pedestrian crossings need lowering.

There is a positive example too - the public utility Derven, which moved its payment desk to the ground floor and provided accessible parking. So it can be done. It is not a question of technology, and not a question of European millions. One counter moved from an upper floor to the ground floor.

Last month Skopje hosted the „March of the Excluded”, where people with disabilities, parents with prams and cyclists demanded a more inclusive city. Gere Tripkov, head of the Equality association, said then that they hope to finally be met with a smile from the other side rather than with rejection.

There is something painful in this story that has nothing to do with stairs. The mapping of the barriers is being done by high school students, with European money, as a project. And every employee in every one of those institutions already knows the list they will produce, because they look at it every day on their way in. Knowing was never the problem.