Glad this is helpful! I'm alone in my home getting over the flu right now, so I'm enjoying bringing back my childhood. :-) I feel like I should put in a bit of a disclaimer, though. I'm a straight white Canadian male (currently age 27, even though it probably doesn't sound like it), and a bit of a nerd. My best friends in childhood, both blind and sighted, were almost all straight white male nerds as well. I think a lot of what I'm saying is pretty widely applicable, but I really have no way to know what parts of it aren't that applicable. I have no idea what the blind girls were playing with while me and the boys were involved in extremely important discussions about what kind of dinosaurs they would ride in Star Wars if they ever rode dinosaurs (because both dinosaurs and Star Wars were a long time ago, so obviously it could happen!).

> "accomplishment and the elation we feel from success - even alone - is one of the most important aspects of playing".

Yes, I agree with that, with one important proviso. At least for me, the successes were only meaningful when they were successes involving challenges I had set for myself. That's why I tired quickly of a lot of puzzles, and why I never cared even a little bit for kits with assembly instructions. I felt like successfully following instructions given to me by someone else wasn't really interesting or fun. But I suspect that's just me; I know some people who do get tons of satisfaction from following instructions, and checking off items on check lists, and I don't think a lack of sight would make someone any more or less likely to enjoy that. On the other hand, I could never read any of the instructions I got with toys myself, because they were all in print pictures. So following them would have meant getting someone to read or describe the photographic instructions to me, and thus giving up some of my Independence. Maybe if all of my toys had come with instructions I could follow by myself I might have felt differently about them, I don't know. As an adult, I do find completing quests in online games deeply satisfying. But I find it even more satisfying when I find an unintended behavior, bug, or exploit that allows me to complete the quest in a way the game author didn't intend and/or doesn't want. So it's possible that I'm just a terrible person.

> satisfying noises into my design

Speaking of satisfying noises, I had forgotten just how satisfying the sound of searching for a particular Lego block in a container of Lego is. When you stick your hand in there and go for a rummage, it makes this lovely loud noise, and you really feel like you're up to something important. And then you find the bit you wanted, and put it where you wanted it to go, and it's a little mini success. And the entire process of building something out of Lego is just experiencing that same small success over and over and over again, until you finish your structure, and it's built-up into one large success. I may not have gotten out of my pajamas today, but I built a truck with 12 wheels and a ramp so I can drive another smaller truck in to the bigger one. Then I had an almost overpowering urge to go "vroom vroom", so I had to get up and check the computer before I regressed in age any further. What have you done with your day? LOL.

> justifies incorporating braille into a design.

Yes, I guess so. But mum didn't teach me to read; I learned to read at school. I'm not sure that a toy that set-out to teach Braille as a primary purpose would be much fun. But a toy could expose young kids to Braille, and that would help when it comes time to learn it later on. Although if you're doing a toy for older kids who can read, at least a little, having Braille on the packaging and any instructions in Braille would be a good thing, of course.

> how are you able to build something like a building/castle in Lego?

Well, if you take it right down to basics, buildings are really just boxes, and cars and trucks are boxes with wheels on. And every blind person has felt a box probably even before they were a year old. As I grew, my concept of different buildings expanded from "big wooden boxes that people live in" as people described things to me (roofs often come to a peak, etc) and as I felt different things myself (scale models of buildings at museums, a model barn my grandfather gave me, a Princess Barbie Castle my cousin had, a plastic model of the Lunar Module purchased for me when we went to Cape Canaveral, and so on). Once I understand the shapes of things, it's easy for me to combine them in my head, even without vision, and come up with a moon castle that has walls with towers along them, gates defended by mini-figures, and the towers all have broadcast antennas and rotating laser guns on them, because that's what makes it a moon castle, of course.

> Would you enjoy an object or a toy that involves something scented?

Personally, no. But I have allergies to a lot of the chemicals they use in perfumes and chemical scents. So maybe other blind people would enjoy that, I don't know. The only other thing I enjoy in objects that I haven't already discussed is magnetism. Two magnetic objects will either pull together, or push apart, all by themselves! For no reason! They just...do! I mean, Lego has bumps and holes; it's obvious why they stick together. But why do magnets stick together? Why do they push apart? It's like magic. If you have strong enough magnets, you can even stick your fingers between them, and the magnetic rays can somehow penetrate right through your hand and they'll try and stick together anyway! Well, now that I'm a grown man I know it's because of science. Atoms...and...electrons and...things...make magnetism...because...science! I bet Merlin had something to do with it.

> Did/do you prefer toys/objects that are small? Or quite large?

Again, I think that might be down to personal taste. I always liked toys that I could hold in my hands or on my lap. I find it's a bit more difficult (though nowhere near impossible) to get an overall sense of anything much larger than that. Plus, our family traveled a lot when I was young, so I liked things I could bring with me. The only large thing I had that I loved was the Lego table I mentioned above. What good is even the most fun toy in the world, if it's sitting in my room at home, and can't come on car-trips or to school with me or whatever? I had an electric train set, and I remember being annoyed that I couldn't take it with me to show people without going to a lot of trouble. But that has nothing to do with my blindness, just my personal circumstances. So other blind children probably differ there.

> Is temperature a factor in helping you decide whether you like an object or not?

Not usually, no. Though I remember enjoying how the texture of Plasticine would soften as it warmed up in my hands, and then firm up again when I finished with it.

> doesn't that require a visual understanding of the moon?

No, not really. The moon is in space, and space is where all the cool stuff is, like aliens with eight arms and laser guns and lightsabers and rockets and transporters and robots and doors that go "woosh". And everyone in space has adventures all the time. The only cool things on earth are kings, wizards, dinosaurs, and castles. Thus my 11-year-old inspiration. Even then, though, I knew that the moon was round and much smaller than earth, and full of craters where asteroids and rocks smashed into it. I'd heard lots of documentaries about the moon landings, so I had a pretty good idea what the moon might really be like. But I didn't see that as any reason to limit my imagination. I had also felt a model of the solar system, though I can't remember exactly where. Maybe it was at a library? So I had a pretty good idea about stars and planets.

> with a lot of art and design being about the visual and the emotional responses to the visual,

I think a surprising amount of design doesn't have as much to do with the visual as people think it does. What would Star Wars be without the humming sound of lightsabers? Where would Doctor Who be today without the iconic sound of The Tardis, and the vocal style of the Daleks? I think that because sighted people notice the visual first, you tend to think it's the most important, when it's really just your first impression. I bet if you stopped random people on the street, they could all tell you the sound the Tardis makes, and do a Dalek imitation, but I don't think many of them could give you a detailed description of any of the doctors, or draw the inside of the Tardis. Think about how many people deeply hate fake Lego, because it feels wrong when it goes together, even though it looks almost identical to the real stuff. Everyone knows the sound that the doors make on the USS Enterprise. But how many of them could describe what it looked like inside off the top of their head? Thousands of people are totally devoted to the old IBM keyboards, because of the way they feel to type on, even though they're pretty ugly to look at. I could go on. The only art and design that's exclusively about the visual is comics and paintings.