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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

I am so curious as to what a fully blind person would find most enjoyable about legos.

Does the texture or shape hold special meaning?

I imagine hoding a model car in your hands is like "zooming out" for a blind person, enabling a contextual perspective that they cant get when interacting with the real world thing.

I imagine that scaling up to a whole new understanding of the world. Imagine the first lego set of the space shuttle a blind space enthusiast builds, and the immense set of knowledge that they cant otherwise get.

What a great idea to make this easier for them!

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> I am so curious as to what a fully blind person would find most enjoyable about legos.

I'm not sure this directly answers your question. But I'm totally blind and my first ~7 years of education were spent at a school for blind and visually impaired kids. A whole lot of work goes into mobility training for children with disabilities, so for me it was how to hold and use a white cane effectively, how to navigate around unfamiliar environments, plan routes from A to B, etc.

I credit my first mobility teacher with giving me a life-long confidence in this area, primarily because he made super detailed lego models of the school buildings and used them to teach. I would have to carry out tasks such as moving my finger from a classroom in one building to the library in another via a valid, eficient route, and placing scraps of material in the right sections of the model based on my knowledge of the flooring materials used throughout the school.

It was so effective because it separated the learning of criticle skills from the pressure to perform. Getting up, walking around and demonstrating what you're learning was important, but it came with other responsibilities such as lookking after your safety. That could easily distract you from learning about acknowledging markers, developing a sense of direction and so on.

They're just so easy to work with, and while directions are great, they're not strictly necessary to at least make something. Compare that with the handful of model cars I tried playing with, which had so many screws/bolts/gears that weren't at all interchangeable. I wanted to play with those, but doing so required me borrowing someone's eyeballs to get the thing built, and that deprived me of some of the fun of having a toy like that.

As an adult, I derive similar pleasure from woodworking and other crafts, but it's challenging enough to do that as a normal kid, to say nothing of also contending with folks who can't/don't support you because they don't know how or are too afraid. So, in the end, you have either legos or the simplest snap-together models to satisfy your building urge.

Even as an adult, I have a soft spot in my heart for legos. I've considered using them as snap-together cases for custom electronics projects, but haven't delved into them enough to know what sets would work best for that application. And as much as I like them, I really don't want to buy some castle or spaceship set just to build custom cases for my DIY doorbell or assorted RPIs. :)

If you have a Lego store nearby, check out the Pick-a-Brick wall, you can get a cup full of only the pieces you want.

If you do want to get into DIY stuff with lego, if you have someone you can describe what you want to they can make it in Studio, building software that you can find at https://studio.bricklink.com/v2/build/studio.page

You can then have them export the element list and you can buy the individual elements from the seller or sellers of your choice on https://www.bricklink.com on the secondary market and then you don't need to buy an entire set.

You could also just have someone sit down and help you buy a bunch of common elements in common colors from one or more of the larger sellers so you can have a nice little inventory of pieces.

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