Accessible By Design: Braille Brick

Accessible By Design

Leigh Wolberger Moully

It all started with a brick.

The LEGO group has been a staple of children’s playtime since 1932, when it was founded by Ole Kirk Kristiansen.

LEGO is an abbreviation of the two Danish words leg godt– play well.

And, as the name implies, the company and its products have inspired creative, interactive play through generations.

From a small carpenter’s workshop to a global manufacturer of toys, the company has become centered around the LEGO brick, launched in 1958.

In 2020, the LEGO Foundation and the LEGO Group launched the LEGO Braille Bricks to bring play-based learning to children and users with vision impairment.

At the heart of the LEGO company is the belief that play is powerful.

Through play, children foster creativity and excitement in learning. Through experimentation and discovery, learning lasts.

The Bricks provide their users to engage it 5 key skills that are vital for all children, and especially necessary for visually impaired children take on their future with confidence:

Cognitive

Creative

Social

Emotional Physical.

From the iconic brick, the Braille Brick opens a new world of tactile learning by modifying the brick design so each represents a given braille character.

The addition of the printed letter or character on the bricks ensures the goal of the whole product’s design:

inclusivity

“We set up some few design principles: It has to be something that was easy for everybody to learn, and it has to be fun.

It has to connect the family. Everybody has to be on an equal level, so it’s as inclusive as possible.”

--Lead Lego designer Rasmus Løgstrup

This design opens the possibilities of environments the braille bricks can be used, allowing sighted teachers and classmates to interact on equal terms with blind or visually impaired children. This allows the bricks to be academic tools, placing the Braille Brick and LEGO alongside pen and paper.

The concept of the Braille Brick is based on five key characteristics to teach Braille through inclusive, playful experiences.

The experience must be:

Joyful Iterative Meaningful Actively Engaging and Socially Interactive.

Along with the physical bricks, the product is meant to go along with an auxiliary online activity and teaching program. This method of teaching allows children to work through academic and visual impairment skills.

The toys are used as tactile tools for basic literacy and Braille activities, as well as traditional building blocks for users to develop tactile awareness and other basic concepts needed for future learning through manipulation and orientation. They are for all skills and age levels and are accessible in all senses of the word.

Open to all, Braille becomes part of LEGO life and, subsequently, children’s toys.

The creativity that flows from LEGO bricks is redirected to the ways in which visually impaired children interact with the world and express their feelings.

It opens a new world of play, communication, and learning that are often limited due to the fact that children often play by imitating others.

If most toys on the market are visual and based in sighted settings, those with visual impairments not only cannot connect with the object itself, but also may be uncomfortable in social situations that include non-verbal communication.

However, the Braille Brick is designed as an open invitation at all, addressing through simple, clean design that accesibility is not out of our reach.

The open-ended possibilities of the Braille Brick are the epitome of Good design principles: innovative in use, a myriad of uses, appealing to all just as the LEGO brick is, thoroughly thought out and researched, unobtrusive to free-form play, long-lasting, timeless in nature, simple, and importantly: accessible.

Collaboration is not only in the product, but in the process.

Working closely with the RNIB (the Royal National Institute for Blind People), LEGO has woven education and play through inhouse innovation and researchled insights. The digital campaign and call to organizations focused on helping the blind and visually impaired has allowed the company to showcase the product as having real-world value.

And it all began with a Braille Brick.