TAKARATOMY

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What Are Accessible-Design Toys?

Accessible-design toys are not toys just for children with disabilities. Rather, they are general-market products that children can enjoy regardless of whether they have any visual or hearing disabilities. For example, these toys may use different textures for different colors to enable children with visual disabilities to distinguish them, or have sounds and voices of the toys which are also expressed through their movement and animation for children with hearing disabilities to enjoy. Our aim is to enable as many children as possible to have fun playing with their friends regardless of their disabilities.
Products developed with a consideration for children with visual disabilities in mind are labelled with the Guidedog Mark on their packaging; those made with a consideration for children with hearing disabilities carry the Rabbit Mark. Customers at toy stores can tell at a glance that these are accessible-design toys.

Guidedog Mark

Guidedog Mark

Products developed with consideration for children with visual disabilities

Rabbit Mark

Rabbit Mark

Products developed with consideration for children with hearing disabilities

TOMY Group, which has been working on the development of accessible-design toys for children for over 30 years, currently releases around 300 accessible-design toys each year, promoting barrier-free mindset of children.

Learn more about
accessible-design toys here. (In Japanese)

Accessible-design toys

Japan Toy Award 2024

TOMY wins the Prize for Excellence in the accessible-design toys division!

Let’s Drive TOMICA! Handle Driver

Let’s Drive TOMICA! Handle Driver

This accessible-design toy enables children with visual disabilities to experience simulated driving and play a wide variety of games, taking direction information from voice cues and moving a steering wheel in response to sound effects, all in an authentic sound environment. Let’s Drive TOMICA! Handle Driver is also certified under color universal design (CUD), which guarantees support for color-vision variation.

The CUD Mark is a symbol that can be displayed on printed materials, products, and more, certified by the NPO Color Universal Design Organization.
Disney Princess Sparkling Scan Register
                                    © Disney

Disney Princess
Sparkling Scan Register

The world of the Disney princess is presented through the magic of light, sound, and relief features children can touch. A wide range of contrivances enables children to distinguish items without using sight, including the layout and shapes of play buttons, the designs of bills and coins, and textures of accessories.

Interview
LICCA Brings Smiles to the Faces of  More Children LICCA Brings Smiles to the Faces of  More Children

Since its debut in 1967, the LICCA series has been loved by generations of children as one of TOMY’s most popular toy lines. LICCA incorporates many innovations that enable children with visual disabilities to enjoy playing with the toys through touch, hearing, and other senses. Focusing on one aspect of LICCA, its role as an accessible-design toy series, we interviewed two people from TOMY’s LICCA Business Group, Hirabayashi-san and Sugimori-san. We asked them about the many innovations incorporated into the products and the future of the LICCA series, which is evolving based on the concept of universal design.

Nana Hirabayashi
R&D Team, LICCA Business Group, Hit Business

Nana Hirabayashi

Joined TOMY in 1999. Worked in planning and development of kids’ cosmetics and character toys. In 2018 she fulfilled a dream by joining the LICCA Business Group, planning and developing the house, toys and dresses for LICCA. She also examines collaborations with other companies and develops products through such collaborations.

Tomoko Sugimori
R&D Team, LICCA Business Group, Hit Business

Tomoko Sugimori

Joined TOMY in 1994. After working on molding and painting of dolls’ faces on the engineering side, she gained experience in copyright direction, planning and development of toys based on anime and other characters. From 2018 onward, she was assigned to the LICCA Business Group, where she was mainly responsible for designing LICCA’s apparel and face. She is acclaimed by Hirabayashi-san as an artisan in drawing skills, thanks to her student days at a junior college of fine arts.

When Was the First LICCA
Accessible-Design Toy Introduced?

LICCA has been delighting children for almost 60 years. The current lineup includes many products certified as accessible-design toys.

Hirabayashi

LICCA has always been a toy that children with visual disabilities love to play with. Not only the dolls themselves, but also the clothes and the miniature figures and furniture items that come with the house are highly enjoyable through the sense of touch. But there were many twists and turns along the road to certification of LICCA as an accessible-design toy.

Sugimori

In the past, some people thought that the LICCA dolls weren’t suitable for accessible-design toy because the eyes were printed and cannot be felt. To make LICCA’s eyes cute, we had kept the surface smooth and the eyes big and black, like a cute little girl from a manga. It is true that her eyes are not authentic to the touch.

Hirabayashi

On the other hand, some experts said, “Even for children with visual disabilities, playing with LICCA which simulates the real world is fairly beneficial educationally. After a thorough review by concerned parties, the LICCA doll was officially certified as an accessible-design toy. As a result, starting with the Doll and Dress Series released in 2008, most products in the LICCA series have been certified as accessible-design toys, with the exception of some character collaboration products.

Sugimori

Actually, even before that we had one certified accessible-design toy product. That product was Hello LICCA, Let’s Talk!, released in 1998.

Hirabayashi

I think it was certified as an accessible-design toy for two reasons. First, it was a toy kids could fully enjoy by listening to its sounds and voices. Second, it had a buzz factor because it used a mobile telephone, a leading-edge item at the time, as a motif.

With Hello LICCA, Let’s Talk!, when the child presses a button on the mobile telephone, LICCA speaks one of 1,080 recorded messages
Hello LICCA, Let’s Talk! caused a sensation when it was launched in 1998 for ¥4,980.

Subtle Ingenuities Make Toys
Easy to Play With and Handle.

Can you tell us about your innovations and considerations to make it easier for children with visual disabilities to handle your products, using actual products as examples?

Hirabayashi

One innovation was to introduce accessories that could be fixed in place using the series’ standard-sized protrusions and holes. In the LICCA House Series, launched in 2023, La maison with LICCA Swing Set and Slide included a dining table with holes on the tabletop and dishes, cups, etc. with protrusions on the bottom to fit into the holes. The small items could be placed securely on the dining table using the protrusions and holes, preventing them from being dropped or lost while playing.

Hirabayashi

According to a survey of purchasers of the La maison, many parents responded that their children loved playing with the dining table. It could be that many kids just love the action of fitting the protrusions of the small dishes into the holes.

Dishes, cups, etc. are fitted with protrusions. These snap into holes in the tabletop to fix them in place.

Sugimori

Also, for the shampoo and rinse bottles for the bathroom, only the shampoo bottle is fitted with ridges.

Hirabayashi

This contrivance mimics actual shampoo bottles, which are ridged so that people can distinguish shampoo from rinse even when their eyes are closed because they are washing their hair. The same is true of the milk cartons, which have small notches on the top just as real milk cartons do. So children can tell the milk cartons from other drink cartons by touch, in the same way as in the real world.

So universal design in the real world is applied in LICCA’s world in the same way.

Ridges are formed on the side of the shampoo bottle only (front of picture). This slight surface roughness plays a valuable role in expanding the toy’s play possibilities.

Sugimori

Here’s another example. In the LICCA Dog and Cat Share House, the levers on the included food servers incorporate notched surfaces that tell the child the correct direction in which to turn them. For the dolls, which are identical in shape, the twins Miki-chan and Maki-chan can be told apart by the parting of their bangs, while the triplets Kako-chan, Gen-kun, and Miku-chan differ by the edges of their hats. Here again, children can tell the dolls apart by the sense of touch alone.

The food servers are popular with kids. The simple artifice of incorporating notches in the levers make them easy to play with for greater numbers of children.

LICCA’s little sisters are one set of twins and one set of triplets. All are identical in form and size. The twins Maki-chan and Miki-chan can be told apart by the parting of their bangs, while the triplets Kako-chan, Gen-kun, and Miku-chan can be distinguished by the edges of their hats.

What Universal Design
Means for LICCA

You’ve both taken part in the UD Leader Workshop*. What are your impressions?*For details, please see the column at the bottom of the page.

Sugimori

As I resumed my study of universal design, I was surprised to learn just how many and varied the types of disability are. Till now I’ve been focused primarily on making accessible-design toys for children with visual disabilities. Thanks to this workshop, I've gained a broader perspective.

Hirabayashi

Each type of disability brings its own set of challenges. We may never be able to create a product that will satisfy all children. But it was empowering to think that maybe I could reduce the number of children who pick up a toy and are disappointed because it doesn't give them pleasure to play with.

Can you apply what you learned in the workshop to the products you're developing now?

Sugimori

We plan to incorporate even more innovations for universal design in the products we're planning to release. In the workshop we experienced changing dolls' clothes with just one hand. This new realization of how inconvenient changing dolls’ clothes can be for children who have difficulty using both hands, I was inspired to research ways of making this kind of action easier.

Hirabayashi

Right now I'm developing a new house for LICCA. I’m looking at elements I can add to make the house more fun than ever to play with by touch and sound. For example, I’m working on incorporating different floor textures, with embossed surfaces and so on, and playing sounds when the front door opens and closes. At the next workshop, I’m going to bring a prototype with me, so I can get frank feedback from participants from a universal-design perspective, leading to even better products.

Mini column
Promoting Universal Design through ONE TOMY!

01Developing products that as many children as possible can enjoy playing with begins with fostering the right culture within the company.

In 2022 TOMY began cultivating “UD leaders.” These leaders avidly study universal design and apply the knowledge and skills they acquire to the design of Asobi.
This fiscal year, 20 people gathered from various departments are taking part in lectures and workshops on improving products from the point of view of universal design. Their aim is to obtain a qualification as “UD coordinators."
The members who take part in the workshops take the knowledge they gained back to their respective departments where they work on developing products and services that as many children as possible can enjoy.

Here we see an actual UD leader training session in progress. Participants start by attending lectures, learning about various types of disability and the basics of universal design.
Included in the curriculum are sessions in which members experience disabilities first hand by using toys while wearing glasses that make it difficult to see or trying to distinguish embossed text by their sense of touch alone.

01Tactile Markings on all electronic toys!

A raised dot on the ON side of the power switch. A tactile ring encircling the screw hole of a battery cover. These features make it easy to discern whether a power switch is ON or OFF and to find the screw hole to remove a battery cover, both for children with visual disabilities who want to play and for adults with visual disabilities who need to perform these tasks.
Originally these innovations were adopted only for accessible-design toys. In 2023, TOMY decided to apply them to all electronic toys, and in 2024 the entire TOMY Group, in Japan and worldwide, followed suit. A process was established so that, if a toy’s shape made it impossible to apply tactile markings, the issue had to be referred for consideration before development could continue. In this way the TOMY Group strives to implement tactile markings on as many products as possible so that children with visual disabilities can enjoy their toys carefree and with ease. Even a small raised dot can lead to a significant step forward.

A raised dot on the ON side enables children to tell by the sense of touch whether a toy is ON.
This design makes it easy to find the screw hole for opening the battery cover.