A New Season

I completed this seemingly endless semester achieving my goal of an A in physics and feeling physically and mentally exhausted. For about a week I have not wanted to study or, God forbid, worry about which section of Vogsphere's paperwork labyrinth my request for a Braille pre-calculus textbook might be stuck in at the moment. Instead I have been reading and playing a demonstration of the first accessible flight simulation game.
Three-D Velocity

Once satisfied that I could shoot down other aircraft and land without crashing, I moved on to something else. The picture you see was written inside a Java program which makes use of a graphics library by Richard Baldwin to output an SVG (scalable vector graphics) file. His description of the process - one of the modules of his online book on accessible physics for blind students can be found
here.
What's unique about this simple drawing is that I created it without seeing or touching it. Many blind people would probably be able to scratch out something similar on a tactile drawing pad, but I neither have one of these nor the equipment/software needed to emboss an SVG file. Instead, each time I made a change I converted to JPG and sonified using the vOICe learning edition.

A leaf pattern is the first test drawing that came to mind because plants seem to be surrounding me. They are all around my apartment complex, at the grocery store, and almost everywhere else both in and outdoors. On the short bus, it seems to be the plants which stand out in my mind and inform me that I am approaching school. The typical landmarks sightlings might use such as nearby buildings are less likely to get my attention than these patterns which can sometimes seem to repeat hundreds of times in one frame. Unless they smelled nice, I was never very interested in them before the glasses. Back then I probably would have guessed that my first drawing would be of a homework assignment or some electronic gadget, but stacks of familiar machines or branches of vector diagrams are not lining my way to remind me that there is natural order in the world. To draw an entire plant requires use of the 3D illusion and will have to wait until I am fluent enough to convey it. In the future, as the drawing interface becomes easier to use and I improve, I will draw and post pieces of my experience. Right now, though, I am remembering that the last time I flew something like an F16 I was shot down by a battleship. The deranged scientist then demanded that our airforce surrender unconditionally to prevent his worldwide release of genetically engineered clone soldiers.