Mobility of the visually impaired person in public transport of São Carlos/ S

Abstract

The present research arose from the need to expand the scarce studies on the mobility of visually impaired people in public transportation, focusing on the city of São Carlos / SP. The purpose of this research was to analyze the relationship between people with visual impairment and public, collective and individual transport, regarding mobility, accessibility, adaptation and barriers encountered in their use. As a method, the differential approach was used, through a semi-structured interview script, from which two individuals with visual impairment, users of collective or individual public transportation, eight public bus drivers (buses) and ten drivers of individual public transport (taxis). In the results, in the interviews with public transport drivers (individual and collective), it was pointed out that there are still rare visits to people with visual impairment, and many of these drivers reported that they attended a few times. It was also evident the desire of all the drivers of improvements made in the transport, aiming progress towards the service to the visually impaired people. The two visually impaired participants demonstrated that they had already made use of the BusAlert application, which is currently desativated, which from their understanding could help collective public transport employees and all users of the service. It can be concluded that, although visually impaired users are adapted to the conditions of use of buses and taxis, many difficulties were encountered in the use of these.