Doctor Who for blind children

Meet Louis

Louis Moorhouse, from Bradford has been blind since he was 18 months old.

Now aged 19, and about to finish his first year at University, Louis has been a beneficiary of Living Paintings Touch to See library since childhood; enjoying and learning from the audio tactile images and books, developing skills and experiencing things his sighted peers take for granted.

• Read Louis' story

The idea

Recently Louis approached us with a brilliant idea: to create a Touch to See book based on the greatly loved character: Doctor Who.

 “I’m a big fan of the show Doctor Who, but I have yet to fully meet the weird and wonderful characters, aliens, monsters and devices from the show because I can’t see them.

If I could sum up what I think is the most important thing about my campaign I would ask a sighted person to just imagine – close your eyes and now imagine you can’t open them ever again. This is how it is and now you want to read a book or watch Doctor Who. How are you going to do that? How important is reading a book to you? As a sighted person how would you feel if that was taken away from you and you couldn’t read anymore?

Then you discover Living Paintings and the books are full of characters you’ve heard about and imagined all the time, they’ve been on TV, you’ve listened to the audio books, you may have had the books read to you and you never quite understood what they looked like and now, because of Living Paintings you do.”

 Louis Moorhouse

We sprung into action, gaining permission from the BBC to proceed with the project and planning for not one book but three; each featuring tactile images of The Doctor in various incarnations along with many other characters (like the Daleks) from the cult TV show. The books will be accompanied by audio soundtracks for which we hope to enlist the help of one or more of the fabulous actors to take on the iconic role since the programme first launched in 1963.

We’ve had the honour of watching Louis grow up with our special Touch to See books and it touches our heart to know what a difference our work has made in helping him to become the inspirational young man he is today.  So when he came to us asking if we could help him ‘see’ images from Doctor Who, the answer was a resounding ‘yes’…. but.

This will be the most amazing project but what is so special about it is that Louis has taken on the very big challenge of raising the money to make it possible. Even more incredible is that this isn’t just for him – he wants other blind people to benefit too

Please help Louis in his mission by donating online, via our website, please let us know in the message box that your donation is for Louis’ campaign. Thank you.

We can’t wait to get going with revealing the iconic images of Doctor Who to all our blind beneficiaries and support his efforts every step of the way.

You can do it Louis!

• Donate now to support Louis