A few months ago I first looked at the delayed rollout of LED next train displays around Melbourne railway stations, the uselessness of the green buttons that serve as their substitute around the rest of the network, and the difficulties it presents to the disabled.
Over at Southern Cross they have put a little more effort into their timetable information / emergency assistance intercom, with braille text being added alongside the normal instructions.
Unfortunately the usefulness of the braille translation is debatable, as a commenter on an earlier blog post of mine has pointed out:
If you can read braille and you look at the braille underneath the text on the emergency assistance panels on each platform at Southern Cross you’ll find that the braille reads *exactly* the same as the text i.e. “Press the *green* button for timetable information, press the *red* button for emergency assistance” which is of course *really* useful if you’re blind, one suggests that Left and Right would have been better choices…
Here is a closer look for those playing at home.
With “Press green button” translating to the following in braille:
Press green button
Yes – the sign may meet the Disability Discrimination Act requirements, but the usefulness of it is debatable.
Further reading
It’s better than this:
http://tinypic.com/r/5jsa55/8
I took that Photo at Edithvale Station Platform 2 in 2011 :p
From the look of your photo, it seems like the red and green buttons were installed the wrong way around – the text on the mounting ‘brick’ and the backboard looks correct:
Haha that’s awesome :D.
My favourite unusable accessibility addition would have to be the braille on the myki machines. It’s right above the touchscreen, which you obviously cannot use if you’re vision impaired or blind. If it says anything beyond “speak to station staff” it’s useless, as I assume it probably says “use touchscreen”
So this appears to be a failing in the Disability Discrimination Act. Not surprising, since the whole Act is named the opposite of what it is supposed to achieve.
If they can put Braille messages like that on a machine without actually making the device compatible with disabled access but still be deemed to comply with the law, the law is a waste of time.
I pushed the green button once and was connected to the phone line for the red button. The man who answered was extremely rude and abusive, so it must have connected me to the nearest staffed station.
Braille on the myki machines has been a long running joke – a case of blind reliance on standards:
http://blog.idlab.com.au/no-such-thing-as-standard-beauty/
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Good thing that regardless of which button you press, you should be able to get some help.
Also not that the buttons discriminate against Red/Green colourblind people.
Which is around 8 per cent of men (one in 12) and 0.5 per cent of women (one in 200):
http://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-1327,00.html
[…] all sites fine, until there is dreaded red text on a green background or instructions that are to push the green button not the red button. Thankfully this is a lot less common though still not unheard of (though some train stations in […]
[…] Vision impaired and the green button * […]
The text on the old ones should at least read ‘Press the Green, or right side button’. to add the leftside rightside to the line would help people who are color blind.
Any advancement to help blind people would always be a positive move in my view.
Or, to just have a text above the respective buttons should help people who are color blind.