#248 2020 · The LEGO Foundation / LEGO Group · Toys / educationreframe
LEGO taught braille without building a separate braille product
the problem
Learning aids for a disability are usually built as separate, specialized products, which are more expensive to produce, sold through narrower channels, and used apart from the mainstream version everyone else plays or works with — so the learner is set apart by the tool meant to include them
background
Braille literacy among blind and visually impaired children has been declining for decades in many countries as audio technology substitutes for tactile reading, and the standard learning tools — braille slates, dedicated braille-teaching kits — are specialized, often institutional products, disconnected from the ordinary toys sighted classmates and siblings play with. A child learning braille this way learns it apart from play, using a tool nobody else in the room is also using, which is both a smaller market that struggles to fund product development and a subtly isolating experience for the child.
The Danish Association of the Blind first proposed the idea to the LEGO Foundation in 2011, and the Dorina Nowill Foundation for the Blind in Brazil raised it again in 2017; the eventual answer wasn't a new braille-teaching product, but bricks molded so the arrangement of studs on top of an otherwise standard LEGO brick corresponds to a letter or number in braille, with the same character printed on top for sighted users to read simultaneously.
the move
Rather than design and manufacture a standalone braille-teaching device, LEGO adapted its own existing brick geometry and injection-molding tooling to encode braille directly into a fully compatible LEGO piece — buildable, stackable, and playable with the billions of ordinary bricks already in circulation worldwide, and usable identically by blind and sighted children in the same play session rather than in parallel, separate activities.
the payoff
LEGO Braille Bricks launched in seven countries in August 2020 (Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, UK, USA) with immediate plans to reach twenty countries across eleven languages by early 2021, distributed free to schools and organizations for the blind rather than sold as a retail product, following pilot testing conducted over nearly two years across five countries with blind community input.
what came after
LEGO Braille Bricks is frequently cited in inclusive-design and toy-industry literature as a model for building accessibility into an existing mainstream product's manufacturing process rather than creating a segregated 'special needs' product line, and the LEGO Foundation has continued expanding language and country coverage in the years since the initial rollout.
filed under
references
- [1]Dezeen — Lego launches Braille Bricks for blind and partially sighted childrenDezeen, 2019dezeen.com
- [2]BrickJournal — LEGO Braille Bricks to Launch in Twenty Countries Over the Next Six Months Following Successful Pilot ProgramBrickJournal, 2020brickjournal.com