How can companies make their products more accessible to people with visual impairment? Let’s take a closer look at the LEGO Braille Bricks campaign which sought to do just that.

Why LEGO is building a more accessible future

Danish toy manufacturer LEGO is known for its brightly-coloured building blocks. The company’s designs enable children to build dynamic structures out of interlocking shapes, either by sticking to a set pattern or starting from scratch.

Playing with LEGO blocks has been popular amongst children for decades, with LEGO establishing itself as a brand trusted by parents around the globe.

However, the company realised that not everyone was catered to in product development. In particular, visually impaired children were unable to engage with their blocks, due to the inherently visual aspect of the building process.

Partnering with global visual impairment experts and drawing on expertise and research from the company’s own educational foundation, LEGO set about finding a solution that would bring the magic of play to a wider audience.

The end result is LEGO Braille Bricks, a concept that was first unveiled at the Sustainable Brands Conference in Paris in 2019. The blocks use the Braille communication system, ingraining it on each block to help visually impaired children join in with the LEGO fun.

Learning through play

The LEGO Foundation forms the charitable wing of LEGO. The organisation champions the positive impact of childhood play, fuelled by the belief that playtime fuels imagination, sparks creativity, and builds problem-solving skills.

By nurturing these skills at an early stage, they can then be carried into adulthood, as childhood games transform into the literal ‘building blocks’ of a happy, healthy, productive life.

The foundation works with partners all over the world to find new ways of making sure playtime is educational and for everyone.

LEGO Braille Bricks achieve both educational and accessible outcomes in keeping with the aims of the foundation, bringing a staple of childhood play to an audience that had been traditionally excluded.

Adding Braille symbols to LEGO bricks provides an opportunity for children to learn the Braille writing system. Using LEGO as the platform for this educational goal also makes learning much more fun and engaging.

By working closely with RNIB (The Royal National Institute for Blind People), discussing with educators, and harnessing the power of savvy digital marketing, LEGO was able to develop and showcase a product that has real-world value for children, giving them the tools they need to communicate through play-based learning.

Weaving education into the LEGO campaign

Prior to LEGO working with the RNIB to develop Braille Bricks, the company had already received feedback from visual impairment organisations including The Danish Association of the Blind and Brazil’s Dorina Nowill Foundation for the Blind, each of which was eager for LEGO to make its products more accessible.

This collective feedback helped LEGO assess the wider market. There was not only true demand for the product, but hearing from a global marketplace emphasised the importance of a multi-lingual, multinational approach, that appealed to visually impaired children, but also allowed them to learn Braille codes in their own languages.

LEGO knew they needed to gauge audience receptivity to the new building blocks before a full-scale launch, to iron out any problems in product development. To do this, they first performed small pilot trials in key markets.

Simultaneously, LEGO realised they had to educate their audience on how to use the company’s new Braille Bricks, rather than simply bringing the product to market and expecting people to understand its significance and usability.

Together with developing short, engaging educational videos, LEGO set about creating a MOOC (massive open online course) which provided insight into the value of inclusive education and its real-world application in classrooms.

Rebuilding the world with LEGO

To showcase the product to a wider audience, LEGO incorporated the newly minted Braille Bricks into its Rebuild the World campaign, spearheaded by in-house creative branch The LEGO Agency and French creative agency BETC Paris.

The first brand campaign by LEGO since the 1980s, Rebuild the World included a live-action adventure film, accompanied by messages reinforcing the company’s dedication to innovation and progress.

This campaign allowed LEGO to position itself as a pioneer of educational play and a conduit for positive change in the world.

The impact of the LEGO Braille Bricks campaign

Following a successful pilot trial, Braille Bricks launched in 2020 across twenty countries and several languages.

The timing of product development and marketing is pivotal to this campaign’s success. Charities focusing on blindness and visual impairment had been calling on LEGO to create a similar product for some time (and Braille Bricks were already in development in 2019). But the worldwide shift to remote learning in 2020 prompted a growing demand for educational toys and pushed new concepts to the fore.

LEGO was able to pool its vast resources as an established business, drawing on both in-house creative innovation and research-led insights. However, the company was also open to suggestions and collaboration, remaining flexible enough to shift with changing demands and move with the times.

This is a key lesson for both known brands and new brands: look for ways to stay agile while you grow.

The success of the campaign shows that businesses don’t need to shy away from making their products and services more accessible, and accommodating new audiences doesn’t have to mean alienating the existing ones.

Instead, accessibility can be a route to greater customer satisfaction, a means to shift perceptions of your brand, and a life-changing way to improve product usability for underrepresented communities.

Read our recent post on accessibility for tips on doing this for your business too.

Ready to talk accessibility?

Contact Sookio to find out how to make accessibility a priority in your own marketing campaigns.