Since the first Lego earned its patent on Jan. 28, 1958, the little interlocking bricks have amassed a voracious, global following. The building bug bit Matthew Shifrin when he was just a little kid. But there was a problem.
“There were no accessible instructions at that time,” the Newton resident recalled. “Lego instructions all have pictures in them. If you’re a blind person, that’s absolutely useless because you can’t see the pictures.”
Shifrin, 28, was born without sight, so he had to ask his parents to help him build even the most basic Lego sets. “It was not fun,” he said. It also took forever. But on his 13th birthday a babysitter and friend changed everything.
Lilya Finkel handed Shifrin a big box along with a thick binder. “And in this binder were the first-ever set of accessible Lego instructions,” he said. “She brailled them on a braille typewriter — that is not an easy thing to do, they are clunky and very difficult to use.”
Shifrin used his fingers to read the instructions Finkel wrote for an elaborate, 800-piece Middle Eastern palace. She devised descriptive terminology for every size and shape. Finkel also presorted the pieces into ziplock bags she labeled in braille.
For Shifrin, being able to build a complicated Lego set on his own was liberating, and intoxicating. “People talk a lot about the flow state they get into when they do a hobby,” he said, “and I was in that flow state.”
People talk a lot about the flow state they get into when they do a hobby, and I was in that flow state.Matthew Shifrin
Shifrin wanted to share that empowering feeling with other blind kids, so he and Finkel adapted instructions for more Lego sets — the Tower Bridge of London, the NASA Saturn V rocket, the Statue of Liberty — and posted them online. And Shifrin’s completed builds quickly began filling up a room in his family’s home.
It didn’t take long for letters from blind kids, and their parents, to start rolling in. Shifrin enthusiastically paraphrased what they said. “My kid, you made him a Lego addict, what have you done? He wants this set and that set. Can you adapt them?”
Unfortunately that wasn’t possible, because he and Finkel were doing this work on their own in their free time. “We didn’t have a team or anything.”
Then tragedy struck. Finkel was diagnosed with late stage cancer. But Shifrin said she pushed forward, writing Lego set instructions throughout her treatment, despite her pain and extreme fatigue. After she died Shifrin said to himself, “I want to keep this going.”
In 2024 he founded a nonprofit organization in honor of Finkel’s memory. Shifrin called it Bricks for the Blind.
“Now we have 30 writers who are sighted and 10 testers who are blind,” he said. “We’ve had over 30,000 downloads of our instructions, and we’ve adapted over 480 Lego sets of all shapes and sizes for blind builders to date.”
In addition to braille, a lot of blind builders use assistive technologies to assemble their Lego sets, including text readers on their phones, color identifying apps and Meta glasses that can see colors.
Shifrin even brought his accessibility mission to Lego’s headquarters. “It was amazing to go to Denmark,” he said, “and be able to really convince these people that blind kids deserve to play and learn like sighted kids do from building their sets.”
Now Lego releases about 20 accessible designs a year.
Shifrin also leads workshops, including for students at Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown. Courtney Wescott, associate director of outreach short courses there, recalled how he walked a group through the construction of a Batman Lego kit. “For Matthew to take the time to create these really explicit, intricate instructions is meeting the needs of so many different individuals,” she said.
Wescott’s team is always looking for activities that will engage the students and strives to expose them to inspiring role models. “To have somebody with a lived visual-impairment experience who’s been able to turn something he was passionate about into a functional business is really impressive,” she said.
And Shifrin’s interests go beyond Legos. He’s also an accomplished countertenor who earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from New England Conservatory where he studied opera. Shifrin also plays the accordion, has written musicals and created the podcast “Blind Guy Travels.”
The workshop participants at Perkins were between 8 and 22 years old. Wescott said Legos sets can help them understand objects they might not be able to picture in their imaginations because they’ve never seen them before.
“A lot of students who don’t have any vision, or not a lot of usable vision, don’t have the full functional awareness of all of the pieces of a car,” she explained.
Shifrin recalled an “ah-ha” moment when participants realized cars had windshields. They had no idea, he said, because they’re usually sitting in the back seat. Building a car with Legos enabled them to “see” that component with their hands.
“That’s why I personally really love their architecture sets, their Statue of Liberty or Tower Bridge,” Shifrin said, “because those teach you so much about parts of the world.”
Shifrin hopes one day blind kids everywhere will be able to walk into any store, buy a Lego set, and run home to build it right away. In part, because he just wants them to have fun.
“Blind kids are so stressed these days,” Shifrin said, “Just navigating school with a cane and whatever bullying they may deal with. Homework and braille books — whatever. And if I can do anything to make everything funner for them, why not?”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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