Lego markets braille bricks for blind and visually impaired children

It’s a game that has introduced many generations to the joys of construction and continues to bring adults back to childhood. Yet, more than ninety years after its creation, the famous game continues to innovate to include more children in these nostalgic memories.

Last September, the Swedish toy brand launched a braille brick kit to allow blind or visually impaired children to learn this writing system while having fun. Unlike a regular brick, the nubs are placed to correspond to the numbers and letters of the Braille alphabet. The correspondence is also printed on each piece allowing blind and sighted children to learn braille together through a fun game.

A fun pedagogy supported by Lego which has also put online a series of game aids to teach players “to orient, attach and stack the bricks through games”, specifies the brand. Among the games offered, the famous “Rock-Paper-Scissors”.

Only 15% of blind people read braille

An initiative far from being superfluous when we know that mastery of this code, the only tool for learning to read and write for the visually impaired, is still little shared. Indeed, between 1.7 and 2 million people are visually impaired in mainland France, according to figures provided by the Federation of the Blind of France. Among them, around 15%, or between 255,000 and 300,000 people, read Braille.

This Lego kit has also been distributed free of charge within specialized schools since 2019. Faced with positive feedback from parents, caregivers, children and educators, the game brand wanted to market it to expand the number of beneficiaries. The only losers in the story: the parents who will certainly continue to step on a Lego piece carelessly left on the ground by the children!