TORONTO - There's no excuse for drivers of public transit vehicles to not announce stops for passengers, the Ontario Human Rights Commission said Thursday in warning operators across the province they could be violating riders' rights if the practice isn't adopted.

Chief Commissioner Barbara Hall said the simple act of announcing each stop would be appreciated by all riders, but it would be especially helpful for the visually impaired.

Hall has written to all of the province's transit operators asking them to report back on their accessibility standards, and urging that their drivers make announcements for each stop.

"Our hope is that in the same way that many individual operators have adopted this as good practice, we'll get a similar response from companies that they view this as a good thing,'' she said.

Hall's appeal follows a recent decision by the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario that ruled the Toronto Transit Commission was violating the rights of riders by not announcing every stop on buses and streetcars.

The tribunal made a similar ruling in 2005 over complaints about a lack of announcements in the city's subway system.

The complaints were launched by lawyer David Lepofsky, the founder and president of the Canadian Association for Visually Impaired Lawyers, who called the legal fight "a horrific battle.''

Lepofsky applauded Hall for trying to apply the judgment across the province.

"There's no reason why they couldn't be doing this everywhere,'' he said. "Every bus has a driver, every driver has a mouth, and I sure hope they know what stop they're at.''

But Lepofsky said the new system isn't yet working perfectly in Toronto, and there are still cases of drivers not announcing stops.

"The TTC still has bugs to iron out,'' he said. "From what I am hearing from people, they're hearing the announcements around the city, but there are instances of getting on buses and sometimes not having all the stops being announced.''

A TTC spokeswoman said drivers have been trained to announce all stops, and the next step is to implement global positioning systems to automate announcements on all buses and streetcars.

Digital signs will also highlight each stop so deaf passengers can keep track of where they are.

But Lepofsky is still unhappy with the slow rate of progress, and he blamed the Ontario government for not pressuring transit operators to do more.

"Barbara Hall shouldn't have to do this,'' he said. "If the Disabilities Act was being properly implemented, we'd have an accessibility standard that would mandate this without needing the Human Rights Commission.

"The McGuinty government last summer proposed a transit standard for accessibility that would give transit providers up to 18 years to start doing this, and that is a serious failure of the government.''