For every generation of children there is a TV series that stays in their hearts and minds even through adulthood. Rebecca Atkinson is hoping her stop motion creation, Mixmups, is going to be just that.

Every day a team of animators manipulate the handmade puppets of Pockets, Giggles and Spin to capture 10 seconds of footage for the new 52-part pre-school series.

It’s slow going, but “incredibly exciting” for creator Rebecca Atkinson, who has hearing loss and is vision impaired.

Having worked in TV for almost three decades Rebecca had always been frustrated by the lack of disability representation. So when she had the idea for Mixmups she told BBC Access All she saw it as her chance to “create a children’s brand that does disability in the way I think it should be done”.

And it is about to go “crashing” into the mainstream on Channel 5’s, Milkshake!

Mixmups follows three friends – Pockets, Giggles and Spin – who live in a helter-skelter house in Mixington Valley, which Rebecca says was inspired by Great Yarmouth.

Pockets is visually impaired and uses a guide dog called Yapette. She’s called Pockets because when Rebecca started losing her own vision she realised “you have to know where stuff is”.

Giggles is a cat with curvature of the spine who uses a wheelchair and Spin is non-disabled and very boisterous.

Mixington Valley is an accessible haven for the three. As well as a slide going down the helter-skelter, there’s a lift going up with automatic doors into the garden, and wheelchair accessible swings.

It’s a world that shows how accessible and inclusive life can be. And giving children the chance to see that is important to Rebecca.

“I had hearing aids from the age of three,” she says. “And I never, ever, saw anybody anywhere with hearing aids.”

She remembers a “spectacular” moment when she was watching Blue Peter and noticed the presenter had something in their ear.

“When I saw that hearing aid, I thought, ‘that means I can be a presenter!'”

But when her mum informed her it was actually an ear-piece, Rebecca’s “heart sunk” and she took that to mean she could never be on TV.

“What we have to remember about children and representation is that you, as a child, fill in the blanks yourself. So if you don’t see yourself represented anywhere, you will internalize that as low self-value,” she says.

In every episode, the Mixmups go on an adventure by mixing key ingredients together. The recipe for a treasure hunt includes a pirate hat, sand and pirate noises.

When an adventure inevitably doesn’t go quite to plan the wise old Lucky Loover Bird, who appears in every episode, voices her belief – “There’s always another way”.

It’s a metaphor for everyday disabled living, full of adaptations and work-arounds.

In one episode Pockets, Giggles and Spin venture to a toyshop, only to find it is in an inaccessible treehouse. They try various methods of getting into it before re-considering the situation.

“They sack off the Old World one and just go, ‘let’s do this differently’,” Rebecca says. “They end up having to build their own toy shop that is accessible.”

The production goes deep into the details of disability. Many of the scriptwriters are disabled and Rebecca works closely with the animators who are non-disabled and keen to get it right.

They have even studied and mimicked the foot placement of guide dogs for Yapette and occasionally when Pockets walks through the door she might accidentally knock into it with her shoulder.

Rebecca also spent time with lots of disabled children who wanted to bust some myths of their own through the show.

“The children I consulted said, ‘we want to be seen out of our wheelchairs, because people assume that we sleep in them because they never see us lying on the sofa’.”

So viewers will see Giggles transfer in and out of her wheelchair and sometimes Pockets will use a cane instead of Yapette, like in real life.

Showing the details of disability as everyday occurrences is paramount to Rebecca.

Mixmups isn’t her first foray into the idea of having to “see it to be it”. In 2015 she launched the Toy Like Me campaign which modified mainstream toys to include disability elements after realising none of her children’s toys were at all representative.

“You might get a Lego grandpa with a wheelchair or a Playmobil hospital set – somebody with a bandage around their head. It’s communicating to children about disability, that it’s essentially the preserve of elderly people or temporary footballing injuries.

“It’s not showing the lived experience of disabled people in any way, shape or form. There was nothing aspirational there.”

So, Rebecca got creative herself – crafting a bright pink cochlear implant for Tinkerbell. She took photos, posted them online and they went viral.

“Nobody had explored colliding disability aesthetics with the colour and brightness and joy of toys and childhood,” she says.

Rebecca was invited to consult with toy companies, but found that these outdated images of disability were so ingrained in the designers minds it was hard to break through.

When the companies sent back “re-imagined” disabled characters, it tended to be the cliché blind man wearing dark glasses.

It’s a “perpetual wheel” of assumptions she’s trying to break with Mixmups and it starts right at the beginning with the storytelling.

One of her favourite episodes is an Easter Egg hunt, with eggs that beep.

The whole game is about the friends finding Easter eggs together using sound. Rebecca believes most stories might use noisy eggs as a resolution to a narrative involving a blind character who couldn’t find regular ‘silent’ eggs.

“That sets disability as the problem,” she says. “I’ll make the Beepy Egg hunt exist from the beginning, with no mention of why,” so inclusion becomes normalised and no play is off limits.

The Mixmups motto, “there’s always another way”, is a phrase Rebecca has thought a lot about while developing the show.

Based in Norfolk and continuing to lose her sight she finds travelling fatiguing. The growth of online working means she has been able to oversee the production remotely, something which might not have been as accepted pre-pandemic.

“That flexibility of work is the only way that I’ve been able to do it,” Rebecca says. “You do have to be realistic about your own health condition and about what is practically feasible.

“Sometimes that other way is actually saying ‘no, I’m not going to force myself to do this’. “

But she is glad she dived head first into the Mixmups world. Rebecca says everyone has been “extraordinarily supportive” and Mixmups has been bought by TV companies in Australia, Canada and Ireland.

“It’s just a total joy for me to be able to see this on screen after so long developing it. I just want disabled people to claim this story.”

Catch Mixmups every Saturday and Sunday from 4th November at 8.15am on Channel 5’s Milkshake! and streaming on My5. You can listen to the podcast and find information and support on the BBC Access All homepage.

Have you ever wondered what challenges a blind person might face in their sex life? Or how they go about meeting a partner in the first place?

Actress Mared Jarman wants to tell you, all to bust myths and break taboos, about disabled people and sex.

“People don’t want to think of disabled people as sexual beings with sexual desires, wants and needs,” said Mared, who has a degenerative eye disease.

“The reality is that disabled people are just as sexual as anyone else.”

Mared was diagnosed with Stargardt disease when she was 10 and lost about 80% of her eyesight in her right eye within a week when she was 14.

Today she is almost blind in her right eye and has more vision in her left but it has deteriorated.

Sick of disabled characters being depicted either as sexless or fetishised, she wrote BBC comedy drama How This Blind Girl.

The series sees blind 20-something Ceri, played by Mared, navigate the already fraught world of dating.

Earlier this month her efforts saw her handed a BAFTA Cymru Breakthrough award.

“Disability and sex is a bit of a taboo subject,” said Mared.

“It’s just ridiculous to think that we don’t have the same instincts and drive as anybody else.”

She said all too often misconceptions were made about disabled characters.

“When I go up for roles that are ‘sighted’ a huge percentage of them have nude scenes and are sexual, the girl is flirtatious, there’s a sex scene… but I can’t remember a single disabled role I’ve gone up for where there’s a nude scene, a kissing scene, a sex scene, anything,” she said.

“[There’s an assumption of] ‘that person won’t want to have sex so we don’t have to worry around about that’ and then on the other side there’s the complete fetishisation of disabled people from devotees and devotism to very, very extreme.

“They’re both huge problems because either they desexualise us or completely sexualise and fetishise us. There’s just no in between [which is the] reality.”

Mared said as a disabled person opportunities had been “few and far between”.

“As an actor it’s rare that disabled roles come my way and when they do they are often very specific as to what they want to portray as a disabled person.”

Mared – who grew up in Cardiff with her father musician Geraint Jarman and mother actress Nia Caron – decided on a change of tack, began writing and immediately found it cathartic.

“It can be soul destroying constantly waiting for someone else to validate you and your worth is, it can have such a negative effect on you,” she said.

“I didn’t filter myself…. I want to be unapologetically a version of a disabled person that I think so many of us in the modern world are.”

From kissing the wrong person to accidentally joining a table of strangers in a pub, how much of what happens to her character Ceri is autobiographical?

“It isn’t solely my experience… it’s of course dramatised but it is the reality of being a young, disabled person trying to navigate a mainstream life,” she said.

No, she has not kissed the wrong person, but, she has taken a seat at the wrong table when on a date.

“It was hilarious, it was humiliating, but it’s far better to go ‘OK, I’ll remember that, and I’ll use it, and I will win in the end’,” she said.

Like her character Ceri, in the past Mared’s instincts have been to attempt to conceal her disability

“It dominated my experiences with people. I didn’t actually enjoy the dating part, it just became solely about this act… but it’s amazing what you can get away with, especially if people are drinking,” she said.

For many people with a disability, “masking” can become a big part of life, said Mared.

“Not just in dating, but in in day-to-day survival – passing as ‘able’ is a huge part of my survival just because I live in a city and disability hate crime is far more common than we think it is.”

Mared’s recent Bafta Cymru win was a big moment, not just for her career but also in terms of her journey of accepting and embracing her disability.

Accepting the award, she said: “For every little blind girl, blind boy, disabled person who has been told that they can’t do anything and have a quality of life, this is for us because that’s wrong’.”

Reflecting on that moment, she said: “I’d reached a moment in my life that I never, ever, ever thought would be possible because of how society and other people had made me feel and unfortunately I’d started to believe myself.”

Claiming her identity as a disabled person has been and is still an ongoing journey, she said.

“I used to find it very difficult just to utter the words ‘I am blind’ to another person – it’s still a daily challenge but I don’t find it as difficult anymore,” she said.

“You don’t just get a badge [that says] ‘I now have disabled pride for the rest of my life’ – it’s a journey, it’s a process, it comes and it goes.”

She described her disability as “a two-sided beast”.

“Being blind is a part of who I am and yes it’s exhausting, yes it’s tiring and scary, but it’s also wonderful.

“It has taught me things about people and about the world and has given me opportunities that I wouldn’t otherwise have.”

She wants to see change in her industry and thinks open casting for roles (auditions where you don’t need an invitation) would be a great place to start.

“It doesn’t have to affect the storyline, disabled people are a part of our lives, we make up a huge percentage of the population,” she said.

“We need to stop ignoring that disability is just a part of life.”