 I'm in the tactile booth with Kevin Murphy, PhD, and he appears to have Legos in front of him. What are we looking at here, Kevin? Well, you are right. They are Legos, but they've been surgically altered and educated to the Braille code. So they have Braille dots on them? Yes. This is this is how I taught my own son how to read and write Braille back in 1981. Kevin was 13 then and had all the attitude a 13-year-old ought to have. He was totally blind. Just like a regular kid. Oh yeah, mad at the world. Mostly mad at himself. But he had cerebral palsy as well as being totally blind. He had motor problems, touch problems, and his school teachers finally threw their hands in the air and said, we can't teach him to read. He'll never learn to read. And of course that upset mom and I. Didn't buy that story. Well, didn't want to. But it was really a no-brainer. We just turned to the only thing in the world that he wasn't mad at. And that was Legos? That was his Legos, right? So I cut up his Legos into the Braille code. By the way, this is audio as well as video, so we're going to do a lot of description of everything here. Okay. Very quickly, Braille is made up of just these six dots. Dot one, dot two, dot three, dot four, dot five, dot six. So if you wanted to make a C, for instance, in Braille, you'd use just dot one and four and so forth. It's really a magic poetic language that makes a great deal of sense. Very quickly, Louis Braille set it up so that all the letters A through J are a variation of this letter G, these four dots. He just used the top four dots. Then when he wanted to go on from K to T, all he did was add dot three. This is B with dot three as L. C with dot three as M and so forth. I never knew that. Oh, that's awesome. Now, down here, we're getting in a little trouble because W is British and in 1825, that was not good in France. In France, if you wanted W like we, it's OUI. So they have no use for a W. So Louis didn't include it in his patent. So if we just pretend there are no W's in the world, we can go on and see that all he did to finish the alphabet was add dot six. U is K with dot six. V is L with dot six. I see the pattern. Right. As long as you skip W, now I learned a little something about the alphabet, too. So who are these best for? Best for anybody who wants to explore Braille, for any reason. Adults who lose their vision. They're especially useful. I make a mathematics set. I don't have it with me. But a blind child in school is expected to learn mathematics as you and I would have if we were given a typewriter. Oh, jeez. That's a little slow. There are only there are only three ways other than this to work with Braille. You can use a slate and stylus, which is like a little punch card with a that's like like your voting. Yeah, you you you clamp the paper in between and it has little rectangles on top of the paper and below the paper are the little wells that you push with your stylus and you can make Braille that way. Of course, you're going in the wrong direction. You have to turn it over to read it. The you can do it, of course, with a you'd have to write it backwards. Yeah, you would. But you don't want to tell a Braille teacher that that's backwards because they'll yell at you and I don't know why they but that's a head turner. So six is where one should be and no three four is where one should be. Exactly. But they don't want their Braille students thinking of it as backwards. They want the written Braille, for instance, the written Braille for A would be dot four, whereas the reading Braille would be dot one. Like you have to learn two alphabets then. Exactly. So while I've been standing here, we were setting up to do the interview. Three people came by and looked at me and said, these things are awesome. And they were specifically talked about in school. So are you finding uptick on this? I've got them in schools all over the world. I've got them in South Africa, Sweden, Australia, Beijing, all over the United States. So in Chinese Braille is just Braille? The Chinese-ordered English Braille. In the world, most of the real good Braille reading material is in English. Oh, interesting. Okay. So how do you sell this? Is there a package deal or how does it work? Well, a set consists of the entire Braille code for whatever you're going. Those six dots I showed you mathematically can only be combined 63 ways. Okay. So this is an English literary set. And so what he's holding up is maybe two feet by one foot with big Lego blocks. So how many blocks is that? Well, this is 160. So the entire set is 320. It's on a board like this, which is a worksheet. So he's basically got a blank black board with a bunch of dots in it that you can stick the Legos on to. Right. And this one with the Legos on it is just another one of those boards to keep your Legos. Okay, to storm. So I would sell the I would sell the Legos and two of these boards come with the set. And then some children, this is just too much real estate, especially buying children. So I sell two of these boards. And so this is a little one that's maybe eight by six. It's 10 by four. Sorry, eight inches by six inches. I meant right. Okay, 10 Braille cells by four, but eight by six. And I make the sets in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, mathematics, music notation, computer Braille code. Wow. And by that you're talking about are those, since it's Braille, what do you mean it's in Italian or French? Well, they only have those 63 characters. You, by the end of the day, will probably come across 10,000. So they have to come and compete with us and do make those 63 characters work as if they were 10,000. Wow. They do it in very clever ways. This is a letter D. This is called a dropped D. Now this is this drop D. I've marked it D D D I S period. And it's really very logical how they can call this three things. If it starts a word, it's not a period and it's not a double D. You would start the word dismembered dismay. If it's in the middle of the word, it's D D. For instance, you could use this for daddy. Oh, okay. But if you wanted to spell add, you'd need an A and two real Ds. This is called contracted breath. If you find it at the end of the sentence, of course it's a period. Oh, wow. This is getting complex. So what do you sell this whole set for, then? $695. That's not bad. At standard Lego prices, that's a real deal. Well, I also, I mean, blind children like to put things in their mouths. You mean just like regular children? Well, more so than regular children because a blind baby, if they drop or throw a toy, it literally falls out of existence and they'll never see it again. But if they can get it in their mouth, they can manipulate it, throw it around, play with it all day, and they'll never lose it. So I can't use regular, you have to use high toy grade plastic and I have to check the ink for all kinds of heavy metals. I mean, I have to take the actual can of ink and send it to a laboratory and have them certify my can and like there's eight metals and it's $50 a test and plus I have to pay the ink. Well, I still think that's a great price. This is a fascinating product, Kevin. For our first interview of the day, this has been spectacular. So how would somebody find out, find these? What's your website? The website is tactile.com. I'm rebuilding it now. Tactiles is T-A-C-K, like a thumbtack, then a hyphen, and then a tile, T-I-L-E-S, like a floor tile.com. Very good. Or you can reach me at 1-800, tactile. Very, very good. Thank you so much for your time, Kevin. Congratulations on this. Thank you very much for stopping.