Lighting the way

Woman inspires ‘game-changing’ device for visually impaired

BRANFORD — Bobbi Racette had an idea.

No, not the one where she and a friend came up with a way to use simple free-form templates of shapes and letters that her legally blind, intellectually disabled daughter could follow and replicate on a Lite Brite device.

The one where Racette thought, if her daughter Irene could do it, wouldn’t it be a good idea to see if others could, too.

So, not long after the October story on Irene Racette learning to create pictures from a Lite Brite device, Bobbi Racette cut out a newspaper clipping of the Shoreline Times piece and sent it to Hasbro, manufacturer of Lite Brite.

She enclosed a note.

“Lite Brite helped my visually impaired daughter express herself as an artist,” Racette wrote, referring to the classic light box with small, colored pegs that fit into a panel and are illuminated to create a lit picture, often with a template.

“Maybe it could be marketed to help others as well,” she wrote.

An answer from Hasbro recently arrived.

Along with a package containing an assortment of Lite Brite pegs and templates for Irene, was a letter.

“We have shared your feedback with our internal teams as well as our licensee partner,” the representative wrote.

For Bobbi Racette, the response was a cause for optimism that she might have inspired a “gamechanging” innovation for those with impaired vision.

For her part, Irene Racette, who completed a design with the word LOVE while on a visit home from her SARAH Tuxis residential support apartment in Madison, said she was “just really excited with all my presents.”

A Branford native, Irene Racette was born with retinitis pigmentosa, a rare genetic disorder that involves a gradual and relentless breakdown and loss of cells in the retina.

It wasn’t immediately clear that her vision was compromised. Once they had an inkling that something was off, her parents set out on a three-year quest to determine why. The diagnosis came when she was 7.

Though she’s now 99 percent blind, Irene Racette, 55, has distinguished herself with her “zest for life,” as her neighbor and longtime friend Connie Nucolo put it. She went through the Branford school system, excelled at Special Olympics, appearing in its national competition in Steamboat Springs, Colo. She also worked as a pastry chef and peeled shrimp at the Chowder Pot restaurant.

“Irene just focuses on the positive,” her mother said. “She focuses on what she can do.”

At the outset of the coronavirus pandemic, Irene’s parents moved her to their Branford home. One day, Bobbi Racette found a Lite Brite device in the closet.

With the help of freeform designs from Nucolo, Bobbi Racette began making templates of shapes and letters from cardstock, with her daughter spending hours fitting the plastic pegs through the cardstock into the Lite Brite device. On Father’s Day, Irene presented her father with a photo book of pictures that included representations of fish, flowers, flags and hearts.

“It was so much fun,” Irene Racette said. “I just wanted to do more and more.”

Now, with the package from Hasbro, she can.

“This could be used by anyone with impaired vision, even people in convalescent homes,” Bobbi Racette said. “It’s so simple, stimulating and fun, why not market Lite Brite for them?

“It certainly was a wonderful way to help us get through the worst of the pandemic,” she said. “Particularly Irene.”

Contributed photo Irene Racette with a design created from a package given by Hasbro as a result of her innovative use of the Lite Brite device.