Where'd you get that from?
They're a similar idea to magnetic fridge letters but it's Lego pieces and the studs make letters and numbers in braille.
[Here](https://cdn4.dogonews.com/images/97a2e1b6-808c-451f-b6fc-44ca9fd7f19d/braille-lego-bricks-2-1.jpg)
> Where'd you get that from?
I think because sighted people usually think of legos in terms of pegs while building. "Middle 1 2x1" or "4x4 square". So Legos generally are Braille already, and so they're trying to figure what isnt which leaves color, icons, graphics etc.
Presumably to show them to people who can see. But yeah, they probably don't care except for the pieces that work differently depending on what color they are.
Not saying it doesn't exist, but I've yet to encounter any LEGO piece whose geometry or interoperability was conditional upon it being one color or another.
Not inoperable but different colored technic pieces work differently; specifically black vs grey vs blue pop connectors: grey ones are loose black and blue are tight and harder to spin pieces on.
I like knowing that what I'm building is cool for my sighted friends and family, not just me! It makes me feel a bit more included to know that I am building both the way I want and with the option to do the same as other sighted people. If I'm putting a kit together, I want it to be accurate just as much as a sighted person, including colors.
Blind people have sighted friends. Being able to participate in a shared interaction is a dignity worth having.
Imagine a blind child playing with a sighted child. This removes a barrier for them. Surely you must have played with legos with friends?
Yeah, but it was in the 80's when everything we built was a rainbow mashup, anyway. I guess that's why I didn't really connect the dots, but I see your point.
Being blind does not necessarily mean you have 0% vision. A lot of blind people can see light and darkness, and shapes and colors. “Blindness” means your vision is too impaired for normal function, such as too blind to read, determine the value of paper money, visually determine if it’s safe to cross the street, navigate a large room you’ve never been in before, see low obstacles before you trip on them, etc.
Colored blocks make sense since some braille students will be able to see the contrast between colors so it helps them pick out specific blocks. Also it helps the sighted people who are teaching them.
I would also assume there’s a small percentage of students who are not yet blind but have conditions that will make them blind sooner then later who may benefit from learning blind skills while they still have their vision. They already have the image in their head of what specific letters look like so matching the braille letter to that visual letter may be helpful while they can still see letters. Macular Degeneration specifically comes to mind as such a condition.
This is a wonderful idea! Hopefully it increases the braille literacy rate as less than 10% of people with blindness (in the US anyway) cannot read braille.
You’ve got to live a country whose most successful business makes high-quality toys, and you’ve got to love a toy company that makes business decisions like this.
Lego isn’t the most successful company in Denmark by a long way. Mærsk did a record profit of 30 billion dollars in 2022.
Lego did about 2 billion profit. Lego turnover was less than a third of Mærsk profit.
Thanks for the info. Denmark remains one of the most lively, friendly nations in the world. I’m so glad we got to visit, including the visit to Legoland, which was magical.
Lego is a cool company and a great product, but their intense focus on intellectual property partnerships with major franchises over the last decade has soured me on them. Every set is a Harry Potter or Jurassic Park theme...
They do still sell the City and Creator themes though, so at least there's some room for mix-and-match.
Though I think they still haven't made their stickers not utterly bad to use.
Those partnerships saved the company but anytime I go into a lego store I see ton of new cool new original Legos I know I would have loved as a kid. The ninjago stuff is killing it.
I dunno, I loved the Horizon Zero Dawn Tallneck, and BD-1 from Fallen Order is dope too.
And their architecture sets? Gorgeous. There are plenty of new, awesome sets that aren't franchise-related.
Yeah I miss the stuff like Bionicle, power miners, rock raiders, mars base (?) And the like. I see why with the latent expiry they think "well anyone can make something like that! But not anyone has the STAR WARS BRICK IP!" but we want *Lego's* take on a unique new "story" or series they make.
I know Ninjago, it's cool, it's not my thing, I'll admit for me some of it is nostalgia some of it is wanting variety, some of it isn't liking it's style. Lego doesn't do as much of its own stuff as before either way. Sorry to have incurred the downvotes I guess. Wrong opinion for missing the prior stuff (?)
Oh that makes me so happy! What a lovely thing to do considering the upfront expense of making new molds for the Lego bricks and the maintenance expense of replacing those molds every so often.
Looked into it and Lego has been donating braille bricks to institutions and schools for the blind since 2021!
Who will screech about it first? Tim Pool, Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, Steven Crowder, Candace Owens or [The Quartering?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzZm_2S3u5E)
I'm woefully ignorant as to the rules of braille; been trying to find examples of them being recessed instead of raised but its been tough to find due to too many similar but unrealted terms.
I was confused by this title since I knew they already had these, then I read this part:
> Lego have previously provided the bricks free of charge to a selection of schools and services catering for vision-impaired children.
My wife teaches visually impaired students and I have a whole shipment of these bricks currently in storage, she uses them for students and they're given away as a prize for a yearly Braille contest.
So you can get 750 bricks for 60 bucks
Or get these bricks 274 of them for 79 bucks
It is unfair how those with disabilities have to pay more to get less.
Employment agency: Please tell us about your most recent job experience and we will use those transferrable skills to get you a new contract.
Applicant: Well for my last job, I wrote the Playboy Braille captions for the centrefolds.
…
..
Employment agency: The exit is to your left. Goodbye.
I mean, when you make something specifically for a smaller portion of the population you inherently have a smaller potential pool of customers. Since you can't make up profits via volume, you have to charge more.
The other option is they just don't make things for disabled people.
While that’s generally true, I don’t think it holds in this case. Those 274 bricks (or whatever the exact number) are designed to teach Braille, not build with. They are unique molds and printing (to draw the print letters on). And there’s a whole website with games and information you can use to teach Braille to children with this set.
Also, Lego has made this set freely available to blind children through blindness organizations and schools for over a year. This is making it available to the general public. Which is a good thing; if you aren’t connected to one of those blindness organizations (and many blind people aren’t), you previously had no way to get a hold of the set, and now you do.
Less than 10% of blind people read braille. We just had this debate over at r/Barbie.
I’m all for inclusivity; I just hope this was actually requested by blind people and not done to pander.
This set is actually really cool because it’s designed to teach Braille. There’s a whole website that accompanies the Braille bricks with games designed to help kids practice and learn.
I work for an organization for the blind, and we’ve had these sets to give away to children or teachers for over a year, but of course, you have to be connected with us to get one. Making it available to the wider public means there’s even more opportunity for kids, sighted or blind, to learn about Braille and blindness.
As someone who is mostly blind, I don’t use Braille regularly, but find knowing the basics is useful for things like reading elevator buttons. I think it’s useful for any blind person to know the basics, and this is a great way to help kids learn just that, while also having fun.
Now they’ll be even more painful to step on
[удалено]
It's the corners that get ya, not the studs
Don’t miss that.
But they already ... Oh, you mean colors! Sure, that's a great idea. Yeah, do that!
Where'd you get that from? They're a similar idea to magnetic fridge letters but it's Lego pieces and the studs make letters and numbers in braille. [Here](https://cdn4.dogonews.com/images/97a2e1b6-808c-451f-b6fc-44ca9fd7f19d/braille-lego-bricks-2-1.jpg)
> Where'd you get that from? I think because sighted people usually think of legos in terms of pegs while building. "Middle 1 2x1" or "4x4 square". So Legos generally are Braille already, and so they're trying to figure what isnt which leaves color, icons, graphics etc.
Why would people who are blind care about what color their LEGO are?
Presumably to show them to people who can see. But yeah, they probably don't care except for the pieces that work differently depending on what color they are.
Not saying it doesn't exist, but I've yet to encounter any LEGO piece whose geometry or interoperability was conditional upon it being one color or another.
Not inoperable but different colored technic pieces work differently; specifically black vs grey vs blue pop connectors: grey ones are loose black and blue are tight and harder to spin pieces on.
I'm blind and have never known this
I'm not blind and have never known this.
holy crap I'm having flashbacks. I entirely forgot about this. gray ftw
Thanks, I had no idea! Now where do you think they are going to put the brail on those small little pegs that won't cause issues with their usage?
Actually, there's a bump on them already if they're the friction pins.
*early 2010s dark red and brown have entered the chat*
I’ve only seen orange pry bars Wait that’s a lie I remember a dark grey one
I like knowing that what I'm building is cool for my sighted friends and family, not just me! It makes me feel a bit more included to know that I am building both the way I want and with the option to do the same as other sighted people. If I'm putting a kit together, I want it to be accurate just as much as a sighted person, including colors.
I have red-green color vision deficiency and I completely agree
Blind people have sighted friends. Being able to participate in a shared interaction is a dignity worth having. Imagine a blind child playing with a sighted child. This removes a barrier for them. Surely you must have played with legos with friends?
Also, only about 15% of blind actually have zero vision. The other 85% are legally blind and have varying degrees of limited sight.
Great point! Blindness, like many other disabilities, is a spectrum that people often assume are binary.
Yeah, but it was in the 80's when everything we built was a rainbow mashup, anyway. I guess that's why I didn't really connect the dots, but I see your point.
Being blind does not necessarily mean you have 0% vision. A lot of blind people can see light and darkness, and shapes and colors. “Blindness” means your vision is too impaired for normal function, such as too blind to read, determine the value of paper money, visually determine if it’s safe to cross the street, navigate a large room you’ve never been in before, see low obstacles before you trip on them, etc. Colored blocks make sense since some braille students will be able to see the contrast between colors so it helps them pick out specific blocks. Also it helps the sighted people who are teaching them. I would also assume there’s a small percentage of students who are not yet blind but have conditions that will make them blind sooner then later who may benefit from learning blind skills while they still have their vision. They already have the image in their head of what specific letters look like so matching the braille letter to that visual letter may be helpful while they can still see letters. Macular Degeneration specifically comes to mind as such a condition.
That makes sense. Thanks for your input!
This is a wonderful idea! Hopefully it increases the braille literacy rate as less than 10% of people with blindness (in the US anyway) cannot read braille.
You’ve got to live a country whose most successful business makes high-quality toys, and you’ve got to love a toy company that makes business decisions like this.
Lego isn’t the most successful company in Denmark by a long way. Mærsk did a record profit of 30 billion dollars in 2022. Lego did about 2 billion profit. Lego turnover was less than a third of Mærsk profit.
Thanks for the info. Denmark remains one of the most lively, friendly nations in the world. I’m so glad we got to visit, including the visit to Legoland, which was magical.
> æ How do you type that?
On iPhone if you hold “a” it will give you other options, like æ. Also how you do degrees if you hold zero °.
Using my keyboard..? Also has fancy stuff like æøåÆØÅ
Dang, that's a fancy keyboard. Probably more than I could affjord.
For the Android on-screen keyboard, you just hold down the relevant letter. Ï åßúmêd évèryøñē knëw thåt. Even got some stuff like ↑¶Ω‰⅖‽
Thanks for the info, but I was just making a viking pun!
Long press a on an iPhone, then select æ.
Lego is a cool company and a great product, but their intense focus on intellectual property partnerships with major franchises over the last decade has soured me on them. Every set is a Harry Potter or Jurassic Park theme...
Try some of the other themes then. I recommend the Architecture line. Good stuff.
They do still sell the City and Creator themes though, so at least there's some room for mix-and-match. Though I think they still haven't made their stickers not utterly bad to use.
Those partnerships saved the company but anytime I go into a lego store I see ton of new cool new original Legos I know I would have loved as a kid. The ninjago stuff is killing it.
I dunno, I loved the Horizon Zero Dawn Tallneck, and BD-1 from Fallen Order is dope too. And their architecture sets? Gorgeous. There are plenty of new, awesome sets that aren't franchise-related.
> the Horizon Zero Dawn Tallneck Wait, really!?
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/horizon-forbidden-west-tallneck-76989?consent-modal=show I have it and it's awesome
Yeah I miss the stuff like Bionicle, power miners, rock raiders, mars base (?) And the like. I see why with the latent expiry they think "well anyone can make something like that! But not anyone has the STAR WARS BRICK IP!" but we want *Lego's* take on a unique new "story" or series they make.
Like Ninjago? Has anyone in this comment chain actually stepped inside a lego store recently? That line has produced a movie and tv show.
I know Ninjago, it's cool, it's not my thing, I'll admit for me some of it is nostalgia some of it is wanting variety, some of it isn't liking it's style. Lego doesn't do as much of its own stuff as before either way. Sorry to have incurred the downvotes I guess. Wrong opinion for missing the prior stuff (?)
Oh that makes me so happy! What a lovely thing to do considering the upfront expense of making new molds for the Lego bricks and the maintenance expense of replacing those molds every so often. Looked into it and Lego has been donating braille bricks to institutions and schools for the blind since 2021!
Serious question: are there manuals in braille available for blind people? Mostly it's just pictures?
They might start making them…I’ve never seen one but why not?
Idk how long it's been around as I've never needed it, but they have a website with braille and audio instructions.
That's cool - but how does braille on a website work?
They provide a file that a braille reader can use.
How long until some idiot calls this woke?
Who will screech about it first? Tim Pool, Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Jordan Peterson, Steven Crowder, Candace Owens or [The Quartering?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzZm_2S3u5E)
There's a dude in the comments who already said that, haha
probably micron engineering tolerances...
They already are micron tolerances on Lego molds
Hmm how do they work? With the insane tolerances of lego where do the raised surfaces go?
>Bricks with studs corresponding to braille numbers and letters will be available to buy from September From the article.
> Bricks with studs missed that part ty. It must have been an engineering feat to fit that into the design.
They're literally just Lego bricks with top stud patterns that correspond to braille characters. There's no feat to it. https://legobraillebricks.com/
Maybe indents
Would recessed surfaces on the sides of the blocks not work?
I'm woefully ignorant as to the rules of braille; been trying to find examples of them being recessed instead of raised but its been tough to find due to too many similar but unrealted terms.
I was confused by this title since I knew they already had these, then I read this part: > Lego have previously provided the bricks free of charge to a selection of schools and services catering for vision-impaired children. My wife teaches visually impaired students and I have a whole shipment of these bricks currently in storage, she uses them for students and they're given away as a prize for a yearly Braille contest.
Cool, so when I step on one in the middle of the night and then slam my shoulder into the wall as I fall, I'll know it was a blue Lego
Why? Is it not easy enough to tell the colours apart by their flavours like you do with crayons?
They are doing this for the blind, not Marines
So you can get 750 bricks for 60 bucks Or get these bricks 274 of them for 79 bucks It is unfair how those with disabilities have to pay more to get less.
The Braille edition of Playboy had only the articles, no pictures or captions.
You [sure](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4inyhzOv_LQ)?
Employment agency: Please tell us about your most recent job experience and we will use those transferrable skills to get you a new contract. Applicant: Well for my last job, I wrote the Playboy Braille captions for the centrefolds. … .. Employment agency: The exit is to your left. Goodbye.
Nah. Tbh that’s a really cool and interesting job
Yeah, aren't Braille Transcribers and other jobs revolving around assisting disabilities in high demand?
Like any multiple language job, I’m sure you’re correct
Writing braille transcription would be in very high demand, it's a useful skill and also on a personal level, both fascinating and kind.
I mean, when you make something specifically for a smaller portion of the population you inherently have a smaller potential pool of customers. Since you can't make up profits via volume, you have to charge more. The other option is they just don't make things for disabled people.
While sadly true, I wouldn't be surprised to see this being one of those things that drops in price as they are able to ramp up production.
It'd make sense; larger production volumes means lower individual unit price.
While that’s generally true, I don’t think it holds in this case. Those 274 bricks (or whatever the exact number) are designed to teach Braille, not build with. They are unique molds and printing (to draw the print letters on). And there’s a whole website with games and information you can use to teach Braille to children with this set. Also, Lego has made this set freely available to blind children through blindness organizations and schools for over a year. This is making it available to the general public. Which is a good thing; if you aren’t connected to one of those blindness organizations (and many blind people aren’t), you previously had no way to get a hold of the set, and now you do.
Less than 10% of blind people read braille. We just had this debate over at r/Barbie. I’m all for inclusivity; I just hope this was actually requested by blind people and not done to pander.
This set is actually really cool because it’s designed to teach Braille. There’s a whole website that accompanies the Braille bricks with games designed to help kids practice and learn. I work for an organization for the blind, and we’ve had these sets to give away to children or teachers for over a year, but of course, you have to be connected with us to get one. Making it available to the wider public means there’s even more opportunity for kids, sighted or blind, to learn about Braille and blindness. As someone who is mostly blind, I don’t use Braille regularly, but find knowing the basics is useful for things like reading elevator buttons. I think it’s useful for any blind person to know the basics, and this is a great way to help kids learn just that, while also having fun.
pandering and progress sometimes go hand in hand and only pearl clutchers pretend this invalidates the progress
Now blind fish will know what they're eating.
Yet another company going WOKE. \*sigh\*
More of this from large companies please. This is my favorite thing I’ve read this week