The Dragon Who Wanted to Become a Princess!

This brief was to create a children's storybook with a minimum of ten pages that had a physical prototype and an accompanying app with augmented reality elements.

I decided to write a story about a young Dragon struggling with identity and the AR elements I wanted to include where audio description and narration to help teach young children with visual impairments how to use the phone as an accessibility tool.

I started by completing the "100 Ideas" exercise in order to push myself and create an original narrative concept. Then when I had a concept I was happy with I wrote a script and thumbnailed the pages.

This required some revision when I realised the initial script was too complicated for me to complete before the deadline, however after the rewrite it was a simple process to finalise the sketch, finish the illustration and layout in InDesign.

When designing the book I made sure to use a colour blind friendly palette, a dyslexia friendly font and a braille font. I added numbers to the top corners of the pages in order to trigger the audio description in the AR app, however ultimately I was unable to get the code to run correctly.

Firstly I realised my script was too long, then I realised that my initial idea of having image replacement AR was inaccessible for blind readers. This is why in my revision I switched my concept to include audio descriptions instead of alternative images.

Unfortunately, I was still unable to get my code to function with the physical prototype, something that ultimately comes down to my learning disabilities making coding extremely difficult.

In the future I plan to upskill in visual programming or use development tools if I come across similar tasks, but I have accepted that I will not grasp C# development without dedicated tutoring.

While I enjoy the final storybook and I think the design is a good step towards accessibility it would be greatly improved by functioning code and more professional graphic design.