[NFBWATLK] Article: Lego Is Making Braille Bricks, NYT, April 27 2019

Cynthia Bennett clb5590 at gmail.com
Wed May 1 19:07:15 UTC 2019


Hi,

If anyone follows me on Twitter or Facebook, you can read some of the
commentary by blind people, other disabled folks, and disability design
advocates including my own and people who have commented on my posts and
tagged me in other critiques. Here is one which points out the irony that
the promotional video did not have audio description and that toys meant to
make braille fun and socialize blind children will be disseminated to
selected institutions with no information how anyone might purchase them.
This critique also features Tac-Tiles, a project of a father to adapt Legos
with braille. I don't enjoy the deficit language damaging to disabled people
written on the Tac-Tiles website, but it exemplifies just one contribution
that this project by Lego, like many others, overlooked crediting the
immense work and creativity disabled people and our friends and families
have been innovating forever because we are not included. I'm really excited
about braille Legos (if I'll even be able to buy them), but the approach and
messaging was again quite disappointing.
https://www.criticalaxis.org/critique/lego-braille-bricks/

I'm on Twitter @clb5590 

Cindy


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Sent: Wednesday, May 1, 2019 11:50 AM
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Subject: [NFBWATLK] Article: Lego Is Making Braille Bricks, NYT, April 27
2019


https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/health/lego-braille-bricks.html

Lego Is Making Braille Bricks. They May Give Blind Literacy a Needed Lift.
New York Times
April 27, 2019
By Sarah Mervosh

When Carlton Cook Walker's young daughter developed health problems that led
to near-total blindness, she knew she wanted her to learn Braille. But the
family's school, in rural central Pennsylvania, was resistant. A teacher
pointed out that the girl, then in preschool, could still read print - as
long as it was in 72-point type and held inches from her face.

"I said, 'What about when she is in high school? How will she read Dickens
like this?'" recalled Ms. Cook Walker, whose daughter, Anna, is now 18. "The
teacher's response was chilling: 'Oh, she'll just use audio.'"

So Ms. Cook Walker took matters into her own hands. In addition to
successfully advocating Braille in her daughter's school, she bought used
children's books, embossed Braille dots alongside the text and rebound them,
teaching Anna to read through the stories of "The Berenstain Bears" and
"Clifford the Big Red Dog."

Now, a new effort is underway to ease challenges like these and help blind
and visually impaired children more naturally learn to read Braille, a
system based on different configurations of six small, raised dots that
blind people read with their fingertips. And it is coming in the form of a
favorite childhood toy: Lego bricks.

This week, the Lego Foundation, which is funded by the Lego Group, the
Danish toy company that makes the blocks, announced a new project that will
repurpose the usual knobs atop the bricks as Braille dots. And because the
blocks will also be stamped with the corresponding written letter, number or
punctuation symbol, they can be played with by blind and sighted children
alike. The project, called Lego Braille Bricks, is in a pilot phase and is
expected to be released in partnership with schools and associations for the
blind in 2020.

"When they get Lego in their hands, it's intuitive for them," said Diana
Ringe Krogh, who is overseeing the project for the Lego Foundation. "They
learn Braille almost without noticing that they are learning. It is really a
learning-through-play approach."

Advocates say the product could transform reading for blind and visually
impaired children, making the experience of learning Braille more inclusive
and helping to combat what has been called a "Braille literacy crisis."
Though the research is limited, some estimates suggest that just 10 percent
of blind children in the United States learn to read Braille, even though
Braille literacy is associated with better job outcomes for adults. In 2017,
less than half of American adults with visual impairments were employed,
according to a disability report by Cornell University.

Braille, once widely taught in schools for the blind, has fallen by the
wayside since the 1970s, when the law began requiring public schools to
offer equal education to children with disabilities. Blind students were
able to join their sighted peers in the classroom, but traditional schools,
biased toward sight and facing a lack of specialized teachers, often pushed
children with any sight at all to rely on magnified print. And an explosion
of accessible technologies, including audiobooks, apps and screen readers,
has strengthened reliance on audio, which advocates say cannot effectively
teach critical skills like spelling and grammar, let alone complicated math.

"Audio can give you information, but it can't give you literacy," said Chris
Danielsen, a spokesman for the National Federation of the Blind, which
offers summer programs to teach Braille through hands-on activities.

Paul Parravano, who went blind from retinal cancer as a toddler, said
Braille was critical to his job working in government relations at M.I.T. He
uses it to write and give speeches, keep track of his calendar and take
notes in meetings.

"If I'm sitting in a meeting and my boss asks me a question about a piece of
information, I can't go stick an earphone in my ear and look it up if I'm in
a meeting with a senator or member of Congress," Mr. Parravano said.

Just 10 percent of blind children learn Braille, according to some
estimates, leading to what advocates have called a "literacy crisis." In
2017, less than half of adults with visual impairments in the United States
were employed.

He even uses Braille to get dressed for work; a labeling system helps him
match clothes that he cannot see. For example, if "a suit is No. 50," he
said, "my file system says that will go with tie No. 46 and shirt No. 32."

But many children don't learn Braille, not only because teachers and parents
often lack the technical skills to teach it, but also because the experience
can be isolating for young children, who must rely on separate books and
machines from those used by their classmates.

Mr. Parravano learned Braille on his own in the 1950s. His mother taught him
at home, he said, using a homemade block of wood and six marbles, which
represented the six dots in the code.

Today, children often learn to write on a heavy machine that looks like a
typewriter, but it feels clunky and can differentiate them from their
friends in day care and school, according to Thorkild Olesen, president of
the Danish Association of the Blind. His organization first pitched the idea
of Braille building blocks to Lego in 2011, followed by the Dorina Nowill
Foundation for the Blind in Brazil, which separately proposed the idea in
2017.

"Many blind children give up learning Braille or will not be introduced to
Braille in the first place," Mr. Olesen said in a statement.

There have been other attempts to make learning Braille more appealing,
including alphabet blocks and UNO playing cards. But the Lego bricks, which
have built-in mainstream appeal and offer the chance to play around with
words, or even play a makeshift game of Scrabble, seem to have a unique
appeal.

"I don't know of any other efforts that combine learning and play as
thoroughly as Lego Braille bricks," Mr. Olesen said.

The Braille bricks have been tested in schools and community centers in
Brazil, Denmark, Norway, and Britain. And, in the fall, the pilot program
will expand to Germany, France, Mexico and the United States, according to
the Lego Foundation.

After taking in feedback, Lego will roll out the Braille bricks next year,
the foundation said. The Lego sets will be free for children through
associations for the blind and schools.

Ms. Cook Walker's daughter, Anna, is a senior in high school now. But both
mother and daughter said having Braille Lego bricks during childhood could
have made a huge difference.

Anna recalled an embarrassing episode in kindergarten, when she had her own
special bucket of Braille books. "When my classmates wanted to feel them,
the teacher ran across the room and said: 'You can't touch that. Those are
Anna's," she said.

Including both Braille and the written alphabet on the bricks would remove
the notion of "otherness," her mother said. And they could also help include
sighted siblings and parents, who are often intimidated by the process of
learning, said Ms. Cook Walker, who works with other families as part of a
national organization for parents of blind children.

"This would be the bridge they need," she said.
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