Stillingfleet mum, blinded after A19 crash in audio book firm success

Back on April 6 2016 Amy Mackie-Sinclair was driving her 18-month-old son, Alfie, to nursery in her black Mini when she was involved in a freak accident on the A19 at Escrick.

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A rock about the size of a human head came off a lorry, smashed through Amy's windscreen and hit her in the face.

"It broke nearly every bone in my face - only my bottom jaw was in tact," said Amy.

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Miraculously Amy managed to bring the car to a stop and Alfie was completely unharmed, but she herself was left fighting for her life. 

"I was air-lifted to LGI and was in a coma for four days. When I woke, I discovered that the impact of the rock had severed one of my optical nerves completely leaving me totally blind in that eye and had cut the other one leaving only 20 per cent intact, so I have a very limited amount of vision in that eye. As a result I am now registered blind."

Just before her accident, Amy's dad, Colin, had written a fantasy book called Elji and the Galrass and had got a publishing deal.

"I had said to my dad sometime after that I would never really be able to read his book and he had an idea," said Amy, now 35.

"He had been involved in the amateur dramatic scene around York for some years, so he set about creating a dramatised audio version of his book.

"One where every character in the story has its own voice, a different actor for each character. After some time, he realised that the quality of the different recordings he was getting made it virtually impossible to get something worth listening to.

"The idea though was a great one. We thought about it and discussed it for a while and decided that there may well be lots of people who may want to hear a story this way. We created our company Behear our strapline is Vision without Sight.

"We built a full recording studio, developed an App called Behear for people to listen to the stories and went about finding some authors who wanted their stories heard and some voice artists to lend their voices to the stories."

Amy at work in the studio (Image: Behear)

No longer able to drive, Amy had the garage at her home in Stillingfleet, between York  and Selby, converted into a studio where, along with Amy's husband, Theo, 33, the family creates stories as dramatised audio series with each story is split into episodes, and each character has its own voice, and we add music and FX.

Amy and Theo Mackie-Sinclair (Image: Behear)

59-year-old Colin said: "Each episode is released on our app for people to listen to. We always say, think Netflix without the pictures.

"We have the opportunity now to get a slot on YorkMix Radio once a week for a 15-minute mini drama which we are just creating."

The pair have also had the pleasure of having several well-known people lending their voices to their work, the most famous being British singer song-writer John Parr who is best-known for singing the chart-topping hit St Elmo's Fire (Man in Motion) from the 1985 film St Elmo's Fire - as Amy went to school with his son.

Neil Foster from BBC Radio York has been in to do some recording also.

Click here to find out more about the company and their work.