Health REAL LIFE
Hayley Kellard, 40, from Stalybridge, wants to make greeting cards way more accessible...
Searching for the right greeting card, nothing was suitable.
Old fashioned, overpriced or inaccessible, it was hard finding Braille greeting cards.
And being visually impaired, this could be frustrating for me.
I was born with a rare, genetic eye-condition called Wagner syndrome – it was hereditary and causes my retina to randomly detach.
13 members of my family had the condition, including my mum Bridget, 66, and my younger brother Simon, 37.
The condition affected us all differently. Mum was totally blind and only had one eye, meanwhile Simon had a cataract operation last year which has massively helped his sight.
Meanwhile, I don’t have a lot of peripheral vision and I can’t see in the dark. I also can’t see small items or text from a distance.
And growing up, I didn’t like the fact I had a disability.
In secondary school, I couldn’t see the board properly and would have to copy from friends.
I had big binocular glasses that I hated wearing.
It felt embarrassing – I didn’t want to stand out from the crowd.
And at age 11, I was taught the Braille alphabet in case I needed it one day. Mum was excellent at Braille, and a few older members of my family knew it, too.
But I never really used it. And it wasn’t something you really saw in mainstream shops. Buying Christmas and birthday cards for my family, it had always struck me how little choice there was.
I could see large-font cards, but I wanted the option of buying Braille for Mum.
There was nothing fun or personable for me to choose from which was frustrating.
In 2014, I met my nowhusband Scott, 38, and we married in 2016.
He was brilliant, cooking for us every night and taking on a lot of the household chores, as well as walking our lovely Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, called Paddy.
But in February 2017, my health declined – after having the f lu, I never seemed to recover.
I was experiencing extreme fatigue and shortness of breath, which came with a lot of chest pain.
I had to stop working in 2018, as I couldn’t handle the commute to the office.
I found I loved Braille
And after a lot of back and forth, I was diagnosed with postural tachycardia syndrome, or PoTS, in 2019 – where your heart rate increases very quickly after getting up from sitting or lying down.
I was put on medication to control my symptoms but I hated not working – I’ve always had a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit and after finding myself unemployed, I was itching to get out and do something.
Job hunting, I saw the RNID, the national hearing loss charity, were advertising a remote role. But one of the requirements was you ha
