“We are so lucky to have found your resources.”

Little Elena has been a member of our library for two years now. Her mum Emilie got in touch to share her story with us.

“Elena has a very rare condition called osteoporosis pseudoglioma syndrome. She was born with bilateral cataracts and had surgery just after birth, but it was discovered that her left eye was not formed properly with the cornea being very cloudy. Elena is therefore blind in this eye. Her right eye had a more successful surgery, with the cataract being removed, she has glasses to help her see and can see large things at around 3 meters at the moment.

Elena absolutely loves listening to stories and has great fun looking at the pictures and feeling the characters from the books Living Paintings kindly share with us.

Emilie tells us “the books you provide give us a great way to share stories with Elena, they keep her interested as they are nice and big and colourful. We are also keen for her to learn braille to help her in the future. She loves the touchy feely parts of the books too.

We are so lucky to have found your resources as I don’t know where else we’d be able to get the exposure to braille like we have, it’s brilliant! The staff are also so very helpful.

Elena gets so excited when we order new books from Living Paintings, she really benefits from them. We love snuggling up as a family and reading these books together. I imagine the world is a scary place when you’re visually impaired so having books to help explain things makes things less scary.”