Not to take away from the specific challenges of blind people, but this is a broad problem whenever there is a mismatch between the <i>map</i> and the <i>territory</i>. The mismatch can come from sloppy work or just from the way the world changes over time and the map doesn't keep up.<p>I've seen plenty of cases in IT systems where bad documentation is much worse than no documentation. For example, there are the ubiquitous handover docs (demanded by project managers everywhere) filled with pages of cable connectivity, MAC addresses, WWNs, LUNs, etc in Word tables or manually-edited spreadsheets. They should all read "For historical purposes only" because you will inevitably trip over reality if you rely on them for live systems.<p>Similarly, there are those that insist on beautiful, meaningful patterns for naming all components. This works great until the pattern can no longer continue, or someone is sloppy, and then the pattern is just a tactile strip leading to a hole in the ground.<p>The solution I've settled on is live, automatic documentation in the form of scripts that generate a bunch of CSVs (or populate a table somewhere to drive a dashboard). CSVs are nice because they are easy to generate and version. I guess JSON would be more trendy these days.<p>I avoid manually-edited living documents and put clear warnings on any historical documents. And as much as possible I avoid patterns in naming and numbering, although that's a hard sell for a few clients.<p>Taking it back to the tactile indicators, I'm reminded of the (apocryphal?) story of what one university did when they landscaped their campus. In the first year they didn't put any paving down. In the second year they paved the worn-down paths in the grass. If only there were some universal way to "grow" tactile strips based on the actual movements of pedestrians.