My Manifesto: The Incoherent Ramblings of a Madman

I was walking around staring at TGSI (tactile ground surface indicators: used by vision impaired people to help find their way around on footpaths etc) all day on thursday with a seeing eye dog trainer, a vision impaired person, a designer, and a builder.

The designer and builder kept saying how difficult it is to get these things right:

Designer/builder speaking almost in unison: "It's so difficult to get them right in the different non-standard situations..."

Me *thinking to myself*: "It's a freaking square intersection!!!!! There's nothing more standard than this!!!! There's a simple diagram in the Australian Standard!!!!"

Designer/builder again speaking almost in unison: "What do you mean it's wrong?"
Me *thinking to myself*: "It's because you're directing the vision impaired person into the middle of the freaking roundabout! of course it's wrong! if you were blind you'd end up dead!!! dead!!!!!".

I felt like killing them. Three (3) hours of walking around looking at situation after situation that were all standard and straight out of the book and yet all messed up. The designer would mess up the design slightly...the builder would do whatever he wanted to and the vision impaired person was too vision impaired to get anywhere with them at all.

They're simple. Either the situation is standard and you don't need them or the situation is non-standard and you follow the TGSI standard. The TGSI standard covers all situations with diagrams - you copy the diagrams. You use commonsense and a bit of empathy. Sorted. Next time I'm taking a baseball bat to the site meeting.