About Visualise Training and Consultancy

Daniel was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa at the age of eight. It is a progressive condition that gradually narrows and dims the field of vision, and it meant growing up in a world that was not designed with visual impairment in mind.

The barriers came early. At school, Daniel faced bullying. In employment, he faced discrimination: recruitment processes that could not be used with a screen reader, interviews that focused on what he could not do, and employers who had never been shown what support was possible. Experiences like these break some people. For Daniel, they did the opposite. Each one built a resilience that has shaped everything he has done since, and a conviction that he still lives by: when you get knocked down, you get back up again, and for every problem there is a solution.

That conviction became a business. After years working in sensory loss support, Daniel launched Visualise Training and Consultancy in 2014 to make sure that other people with sight loss or hearing loss would not have to fight the same battles alone. Most workplace barriers, he had learned, come from a lack of knowledge rather than a lack of will, and knowledge is something that can be shared. From the start the company did two things: it assessed individual employees with sight loss or hearing loss and gave their employers practical, prioritised recommendations, and it trained whole teams so that the next person to disclose a condition would be met with understanding rather than awkwardness. In 2024 Visualise marked ten years of work.

Building a business while losing his sight brought its own barriers. Daniel has written about grant and loan schemes that take no account of the extra costs of running an accessible business, workspaces, events and online platforms that were never designed with disabled entrepreneurs in mind, and people who still underestimate what a disabled business owner can do. Each barrier became part of what Visualise now helps other organisations to remove.

For years Daniel travelled every week across the country, by train, tube and taxi, usually in a suit, to deliver training and assessments, accompanied by his first guide dog, Zodiac, now retired. He has described how Zodiac changed his working life: instead of walking with his head down, scanning for obstacles, he walked upright and with confidence. Zodiac also became a conversation starter, on trains, in hotels and in training rooms, where he would lie quietly while Daniel presented to large audiences. Some of those conversations ended with the words “but you don’t look blind”, a phrase that has since become a theme of Daniel’s training: sight loss is a spectrum, and most of it can’t be seen.

More than a decade on, the motivation has not changed. Daniel loves what he does for one simple reason: it makes a real difference to people’s lives. An employee who keeps a job they feared losing, a manager who finally knows what to ask, a team that stops feeling awkward and starts including a colleague properly. That is the measure of success at Visualise.

“Just because someone has lost their sight or hearing, it doesn’t mean they should lose their job.”

Daniel Morgan-Williams, Founding Director

Seeing Beyond the Eyes

Between 2018 and 2019, Visualise developed and delivered Seeing Beyond the Eyes, a project funded by Thomas Pocklington Trust. Its aim was to close the gap between the optical sector and sight loss support services, so that people told their sight cannot be corrected are pointed towards help at the moment they need it, rather than left to find it alone. A continuing education roadshow for optometrists and dispensing opticians launched in May 2018, raising awareness of what patients face after a diagnosis of irreversible sight loss and of the local and national services they can be referred to. The project’s findings were published in March 2019 and remain available on this site. The thinking behind it lives on in the Sight Loss Champion course for eyecare and healthcare staff.

The Visualise podcast

Life Beyond Visual Impairment, the Visualise podcast, ran for 22 episodes between 2020 and 2024. Hosted by Daniel, it brought together people living with sight loss and the professionals who support them: employees describing what changed after a workplace assessment, an employment lawyer on equality law and everyday discrimination, eyecare specialists busting myths about eye health, and conversations on disclosure, smart home technology and what occupational health should offer someone with a visual impairment. Episodes are available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Speaking and advice

Daniel has spoken at conferences across the sector, advised national organisations on accessibility and inclusion, and written widely on workplace adjustments, Access to Work and the experience of living with a progressive eye condition.