Blind teen performs on the Children in Need stage

Eleanor says Children in Need is an "amazing charity who support so many little charities"

Eleanor is a smart, sassy, very funny teenager, who gets around with the help of her white cane she calls Mike, as in, Michael Caine, the actor.

She was just three years old when diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour. It has taken her sight.

Eleanor says she is "buzzing" to be part of this year's BBC Children in Need choir, which performs in the fundraising show on 14 November.

She's not in the least nervous - her mother, Kelly, says that her daughter always "grabs every opportunity she's given" and having been through so much, "doesn't stress over the little things".

Eleanor cuddles her comforter, Doggie before going into theatre for seven hours of neurosurgery

For most of her 14 years, Eleanor has been in hospital having scans, tests, neurosurgery and chemotherapy.

Her family found out that their little girl was poorly just as she was looking forward to starting school.

"She was dropping things on the floor and then feeling for them and not being able to find them," her mother Kelly remembers.

"Suddenly she was asking, 'Mummy, what colour's this?' and I'd say, 'You know your colours!', and she'd get a bit more clingy when we were out walking."

Eleanor went for an eye test and it was the optician who noticed something wasn't right.

The family was immediately thrown into a world of oncologists, hospitals and visual impairment.

Eleanor was diagnosed with a Low Grade Hypothalamic Glioma, an incurable brain tumour. It's permanently damaged her optic nerves meaning she is severely sight-impaired.

She can see light and dark but no detail - or people's faces. She likes pigeons, her dad Tim tells me, because she can see their dark grey forms contrasting with lighter pavements.

She made me laugh with her cooing pigeon impressions when I met up with her on BBC Radio London's part of the 1,000 Mile Challenge, a three-legged walk around the country.

Eleanor and her dad, Tim joined Pudsey and the BBC Radio London team before his stretch of the 1,000 Mile Challenge with presenter, Shay Kaur Grewal

We have featured Eleanor's story because she has directly benefitted from a charity supported by BBC Children In Need donations.

Living Paintings is a free postal library of accessible books called Touch to See.

When Eleanor was little, these books made classic characters such as Julia Donaldson's Superworm come alive.

She said: "It just kind of opened my imagination really, because suddenly it was open to my fingertips."

The charity sent a box to her for our filming. She smiled as she read the Braille and remembered stories from her childhood like Spot the Dog under her sensitive fingertips.

"There's so much detail on this - like, the nose and the eyes are smoother than the face and ears. And you wouldn't think about that," she explains.

The Touch to See books allowed Eleanor to enjoy children's stories when she was little

Her dad, Tim adds that the books allowed her "to learn things through that method of tactile art, to further her knowledge on things she wouldn't be able to see".

Eleanor is a talented performer and says her weekly singing lessons are "just a little bit of time away from stressful school and everything else that's going on".

She has played Tiny Tim in productions of A Christmas Carol at the Old Vic and was the voice of Lark the animated character in Milo on Channel 5.

The BBC followed her preparations to narrate a live audio description of The Witches at the National Theatre last year - a role usually performed by sighted people.

Without significant advances in medical science, Eleanor is unlikely to regain her sight - and her brain tumour will not go away unless a cure is found.

She has regular scans to check it is not growing and treatments will continue into her teens and twenties.

But this bright girl from Hampton remains unwaveringly positive.

"I try not to be negative because a lot of negative stuff has happened to me but I don't want to focus on that. I want to focus on all the good stuff that I'm doing."