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Play with Braille - Italian Alphabet

A brick set that teaches an alphabet you read with your fingers, not your eyes.

Brick Rated Score

4.3/5

Set 40723 · 2024

Pieces287

Minifigsn/a

Year2024

Set number40723

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The verdict

I sat with this one longer than I expected to, turning the bricks over and reading the little printed letters while running my thumb across the studs underneath.

This is not a set you build once and shelve. Every brick doubles as a braille cell with the ordinary printed letter, number, or punctuation mark stamped on top, so a sighted parent and a blind child can sound out the same piece together. It is a genuinely lovely idea executed with real care, and it is one of the few LEGO sets I would call important rather than just fun. If you are picking this up purely as a building challenge you will find it thin, but that is not the point of it.

Best for: families, classrooms, and speech or vision therapists teaching the Italian braille alphabet alongside sighted learners

The full review

What it is

I sat with this one longer than I expected to, turning the bricks over and reading the little printed letters while running my thumb across the studs underneath. Play with Braille - Italian Alphabet is part of LEGO's Braille Bricks initiative, built with input from blind and visually impaired advocacy groups so the stud pattern on each brick matches the actual braille cell for that letter, number, or symbol. The printed character sits right there too, so a sighted parent and a blind child can work through the alphabet side by side, saying the letter out loud while one of them reads it by touch and the other reads it by sight.

The catch

I will be straight with you about what this is and is not. It is not a spaceship or a castle, and if you go in expecting a satisfying multi hour build you will be disappointed, because the actual construction here is closer to sorting and arranging than engineering. The value is entirely in the concept and the execution of that concept, the fact that LEGO went to the trouble of mapping an entire language's braille alphabet, including accented letters that Italian needs and English does not, onto individual bricks that snap together like any other brick. It is also not something you will find sitting in a normal LEGO aisle next to the City sets, it tends to move through school programs, accessibility organizations, and specific retail listings, so track down the actual listing before you assume it is an easy add to cart.

Who it's for

This is for parents of a visually impaired child learning to read, for teachers building an inclusive classroom, for speech language pathologists, and honestly for any LEGO fan who wants to see the company's social good work up close instead of just hearing about it in a press release. Skip it if you or the person you are building with is after a traditional set with a model at the end, because there is no spaceship waiting for you at brick 287, just a full alphabet you can actually read with your hands.

What works

Every brick is dual coded, braille studs on top and a printed letter or symbol on the side, so blind and sighted builders read it together
Covers the full Italian alphabet plus numbers and a handful of punctuation and math symbols, more range than the piece count suggests
Comes from a genuinely researched accessibility project rather than being a novelty add-on to an existing theme

Worth knowing

Very little to actually build, this is a learning tool first and a construction set a distant second
Limited availability outside partner organizations and select LEGO channels, harder to just grab off a shelf than a normal set
287 pieces at this scale feels expensive next to a same size System set if you are only judging it as bricks

Sold? Grab it.

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The parts story

What the build is actually like, and the pieces worth knowing about.

Building this is less about following steps and more about sorting and matching. You lay bricks out by letter, run your fingers over the studs, and check them against the printed character, and it turns into a quiet, almost meditative exercise rather than a race to a finished model. There is no dramatic reveal moment the way there is with a big System set, the reward is in slowly getting fluent with a whole new way of reading.

The real standout here is not a single rare piece, it is the full custom mold. Every brick is a purpose built teaching piece with braille dots at heights and spacing tuned to real braille standards, plus a printed glyph, something you will not find in any other LEGO line. For a 287 piece box you are getting an entire alphabet, digits zero through nine, and several punctuation and math symbols, which is a lot of distinct educational content packed into what looks like a modest parts count on paper.

Fun facts

01LEGO Braille Bricks was developed with input from the European Blind Union, the Braille Authority of North America, and other blind and visually impaired advocacy organizations to make sure the stud spacing genuinely matches standard braille cells.
02Because braille alphabets differ by language, LEGO produces separate Play with Braille sets for different alphabets, including English, French, German, Danish, Spanish, Portuguese, and this Italian edition, each with its own accented letters and symbols mapped to bricks.
03The project began as a free resource distributed directly to schools and organizations for the visually impaired before LEGO expanded it into retail facing Play with Braille sets so more families and classrooms could get hold of it.
04Every brick in the set carries both the braille pattern in its studs and the ordinary printed character on its side, a dual system meant to let sighted and blind learners work through the same piece together rather than needing separate materials.