Reading Rainbow
The beauty of creating in SVG is that it gives us the ability to play with text in non-standard ways. By creating curbed paths and using text on a path, I was able to break the standardized mold of braille presentation, curving lines of braille across the page instead of just having them in rigid lines.
As I played with the arcs, I found that I was basically making a rainbow, and the Reading Rainbow song popped into my head. I started designing the arcs to come together into an open book, then added a butterfly to the drawing just to cement the overall celebration of one of my favorite TV shows growing up.
The joy I've heard from all the blind braille readers I've shown this tactile graphic to has just been fantastic. It's a moment of discovery, then sheer amazement as they feel the braille words spelling out each color of the rainbow, their fingers following the dynamic text guiding them into the book. The braille starts off spaced well enough to feel each word, but as the arcs converge into the book, it turns from a text experience into a texture experience as all the braille comes together in ways that would make the braille standard creators faint.
