Experiencing the World Through the Eyes of Someone with Visual Impairment

Our Story Video
‍Empatheyes360° has been designed to help professionals, healthcare staff, educators, support workers, families and caregivers develop the knowledge, confidence and practical skills needed to support people living with sight loss and visual impairment.

Through immersive simulations, guided learning and real-world scenarios, participants can:

Gain insight into the varied functional impacts of visual impairment.
Understand the conditions and diagnoses that affect vision.
Increase understanding and retention through experiential learning.
Recognise the everyday challenges faced by people with sight loss.
Improve confidence when communicating with and supporting people with visual impairment.
Create more accessible environments and services.
Challenge assumptions and misconceptions about sight loss.

Founded by Angel Eyes NI, Empatheyes began with a simple question:

‍How can we help others understand what it is like to live with a visual impairment to improve services, education and employment opportunities?

‍The original Empatheyes VR programme was developed to help parents, teachers, healthcare professionals and support workers experience visual impairment from the perspective of the people they support. The approach proved highly effective, generating significant engagement, strong outcomes and a growing body of evidence.

Building on this success, Empatheyes evolved and developed Empatheyes360°, a scalable browser-based platform that makes immersive visual impairment training more accessible than ever before.

Today, Empatheyes360° combines lived experience, clinical expertise, immersive simulation and practical application to deliver engaging learning experiences across healthcare, education, social care and industry. The platform enables participants to explore a wide range of visual impairment conditions and understand not only the diagnosis itself, but the real-world impact on everyday life.

‍Empatheyes360° is helping organisations move beyond awareness to understanding, confidence and meaningful change.

About the Founder
‍Empatheyes was founded by Sara McCracken, founder of AngelEyes NI and mother of two visually impaired children. Drawing on more than twenty years of lived and professional experience, Sara created Empatheyes to help professionals better understand the real-world impact of visual impairment and improve outcomes for the people they support.

Clinical Advisors

Professor Julie Silvestri,
CBE
‍
Professor Julie Silvestri CBE is the Clinical Director for Ophthalmic Services at the Belfast Health & Social Care Trust, Honorary Professor at the Centre Public Health at Queen’s University Belfast and Co-Lead for the NI Clinical Research Network. Prof Silvestri’s programme of research focuses on genetic predisposition and causative genetic variants in ophthalmic diseases with emphasis on age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and inherited retinal disorders.

Professor Silvestri has collaborated internationally with investigators in the USA, Ireland, Ghana and Israel and nationally with a number of research groups. She is currently Co-Lead of the Vision NICRN Research group, which holds an impressive portfolio of industry funded and Investigator Led projects.

Tunde Peto,
MD, MHealthED, PhD, FRCOphth
Professor of Clinical Ophthalmology, Queen’s University Belfast (QUB)
‍
Tunde Peto is Professor of Clinical Ophthalmology at QUB, Clinical Lead of the Northern Ireland Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) Screening Programme and a Consultant Ophthalmologist in Medical Retina. She specialises in chronic blinding diseases, ophthalmic image analysis, epidemiology and statistics and is internationally renowned for setting up and managing diabetic retinopathy screening and training programmes.

As Head of the Belfast Ophthalmic Reading Centre and Director of The Central Administrative Research Facility (CARF), a unique facility coordinating the grading of ophthalmic images collected for clinical research studies, Professor Peto has expertise in overseeing a wide range of studies, including age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy and population-based studies.

Professor Tunde Peto trained in Hungary and Australia and spent 15 years at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London before taking up her current position in Belfast. She has been named among the UK’s most influential researchers who study diabetes complications.

Experiencing the World Through the Eyes of Someone with Visual Impairment

Clinical Advisors

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