Lego will start building bricks for the blind: NPR

This week, Lego announced plans to unveil custom bricks designed to help blind and visually impaired children learn to read braille.

At a time when Braille literacy is declining among Americans, defenders of the visually impaired say that the new product introduces a fun and interactive way of interacting with the touch system.

"Who does not want an educational activity that she can do with her friends?" In an interview with NPR, Kate Katulak, Deputy Director of Academic Success at the Perkins School for the Blind, Massachusetts,

The idea was first presented to Lego by two non-profit organizations advocating the inclusion of the visually impaired – the Danish Association of the Blind in 2011, then the Dorina Nowill Foundation for the Blind in 2017.

Since then, the toy company has collaborated with both organizations, as well as with a handful of other associations for the blind, to develop prototypes.

Each braille block will have pads with the same six-dot pattern of letters and numbers in the braille alphabet. But they will remain compatible with the classic Lego bricks.

The new blocks are being put in place at a time when many braille educators are deploring the decline in Braille education.

"More and more blind and partially sighted students are integrated into public schools," Katulak said. "Because the focus is on the core curriculum … there is little time left in mind to teach Braille.

In the United States, less than 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind people are braille readers, according to a study by the National Federation of the Blind. The same study found that "only 10% of blind children learn it".

By way of comparison, the National Federation of the Blind notes that in the 1950s, nearly half of all blind children learned Braille, which was part of the curriculum of many schools for the blind.

The rise of audio technology is one of the factors behind the decline. At an age when students try to integrate with their classmates, headphones that can mask a disability motivate kids to forget the importance of learning Braille, Katulak said.

But even in the digital age, audio books, for example, can not replace the relevance of Braille, especially among emerging readers, according to Katulak.

"The audiobooks are wonderful, but when you're thinking about listening to an audiobook, you're missing some very important information," she said. "You do not hear how words are spelled, grammar, punctuation, where a paragraph begins and ends."

Katulak, a graduate teacher of visually impaired students, said her students often wondered why they needed to read braille while their visually impaired classmates did not.

Learning Braille is just as beneficial for the visually impaired as learning to read for non-visually impaired students, she said. "If they only learn to read while listening, it will affect their writing and their own reading skills."

It's something that parents understand once they've seen data linking braille literacy to long-term success, Katulak said. "We provide them with evidence that suggests that students, when they learn Braille, are more likely to get a job and have better academic results later in life."

On the new Braille bricks from Lego, expected to arrive in commercial stores in 2020, braille is also translated into numbers and letters allowing parents and educators to follow.

Mia Venkat from NPR produced this story for broadcast. Melissa Gray edited.