# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The gradual loss of Izzy Primeau's peripheral vision hasn't stopped her from pursuing a career in science. A college student, she's learning through her other senses.

"It helps you remember and understand concepts better if you can feel models and build graphs," says Ms. Primeau, who is studying animal care.

A key person she credits with building her confidence and knowledge is Carla Curran, a regular guest educator at the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts, whose teaching methods resonated with Ms. Primeau when she was a student there.

Dr. Curran has taught undergraduate and graduate students for more than 22 years, most recently as a professor in marine science at Savannah State University. But over the past six years, her role at Perkins has led to her most influential work. She has specialized in multisensory exercises designed to make difficult scientific concepts more interactive and accessible.

"Just because people have different ways of learning doesn't mean they aren't hungry to learn," says Dr. Curran. Perkins students' "desire to learn and engage me when I presented the science, despite numerous obstacles and often a lack of technology, is deeply inspiring."

During a classroom visit at the Perkins School for the Blind here in Watertown, Carla Curran shares 3D models of microscopic phytoplankton, 5,000 times their original size, with a lively group of teenagers.

"Did you know that the tiniest organism can influence an entire food web?" she says.

The students consider this as they run their hands over the grooves and crevices of the small white models, learning the parts of a dinoflagellate Alexandrium cyst, which creates harmful algae blooms. Dr. Curran asks the teens to describe what they feel.

"Like a mouth that never opens," says one student, smiling.

The observations lead to conversations about how the ocean affects people, from the availability of seafood to the government's role in preserving healthy ecosystems.

For more than 22 years, Dr. Curran has taught hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students, most recently as a professor in marine science at Savannah State University in Georgia. But over the past six years, her role as a regular guest educator at Perkins has led to her most influential work.

She has engaged more than 100 Perkins students in multisensory exercises designed to make difficult scientific concepts more interactive and accessible. It's an approach aimed at boosting inclusivity and retention among students when it comes to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects.

"Carla's work definitely has had a positive influence on our students," says Kate Fraser, a longtime science teacher in the secondary program at Perkins. "I've seen an increased interest in science by all [Perkins] students ... hoping to find jobs after high school in science-related fields ... and [I] know of former students who went on to college and now work in technology-related fields."

Ms. Fraser considers this a "win ... as there is still hesitancy by employers to hire persons with disabilities."

About 70% of working-age adults in the United States who are completely or partially blind do not have full-time employment, reports the National Federation of the Blind. There's a significant lack of representation in STEM-related fields.

For Izzy Primeau, a recent Perkins graduate, the gradual loss of her peripheral vision hasn't stopped her from pursuing a career in science, thanks in part to Dr. Curran's teaching methods. Ms. Primeau recently won the Young Conservationist Award from Zoo New England and is now studying animal care at Becker College in Leicester, Massachusetts. She credits Dr. Curran's activities with building her confidence and knowledge.

"Learning science through other senses means you don't have to rely solely on vision," she says. "It helps you remember and understand concepts better if you can feel models and build graphs."

In a review of educational practices conducted by Stanford University, one highlight was a study from New York, which found that the "hands on aspect [of environmental education] is an equalizer [for K-12] students with a variety of learning styles and learning abilities." In that study, students who engaged in hands-on activities demonstrated higher achievement levels.

An invitation, then inspiration

Dr. Curran became involved with Perkins after an invitation from a colleague to participate in a project focused on science accessibility for visually impaired people. Working with Perkins students furthered her interest in taking a more inclusive and creative approach to teaching.

"Their desire to learn and engage me when I presented the science, despite numerous obstacles and often a lack of technology, is deeply inspiring," says Dr. Curran, who visits Perkins several times during the academic year. "I continue to learn so much from them."

Her passion for fostering diversity and inclusivity stems from her own experiences facing discrimination as a woman in science.

"During my entire university experience, I only had two female science professors," she says. "People would occasionally make dumb blonde jokes or comments like, 'That's a pretty good idea for a girl.' These are things I don't want my students to experience."

Her work is motivated by a fierce desire to inspire and encourage young people "to stay in science. ... I saw how hard students struggled with reading graphs and tables because a lot of the technology that translates this information doesn't do so effectively," she says.

Dr. Curran's innovative approach extends beyond the classroom. Working in tandem with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Amy Bower, a physical oceanographer who is visually impaired, she facilitates whale watching and trawling trips out of Gloucester as part of a Perkins outreach program. Students help dredge up ocean creatures, such as sea urchins and crabs, which they observe through touch in a seawater-filled tank and then carefully release back into the sea.

The students also participate in activities involving "sonification," which translates data points into sound instead of visual graphs. Listening to the audio recordings of numerical charts, they detect patterns in fluctuating fish populations, ocean currents, and seasonal effects.

Perkins students are well positioned for such studies. "You can't see very far underwater," Dr. Curran notes. Instead, she says, "Science uses sound to study the ocean. Through sonification, Perkins students can hear the data speak. Some didn't know this was an option."

She also points out that students "heard things that I didn't hear."

Such educational opportunities are also deeply valuable to Dr. Bower. "As a visually impaired scientist myself, I know how quickly blind students can be left out altogether in school science labs," she says. The kinds of sensory experiences offered by these ocean expeditions "bring science alive for all students, sighted or not."

A life-changing lesson on whales

Isabella Scott, another recent Perkins graduate, says her Woods Hole experience was life-changing, since she "didn't really think about pursuing a career in science as a possibility before meeting Dr. Curran."

Now a biology major at Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts, Ms. Scott recalls a fateful boat trip involving a lesson on whales. After placing an underwater microphone into the ocean, Ms. Scott and her peers could hear only ship engines. Dr. Curran explained that the whales' ability to hear each other - which is how they communicate and hunt together - was negatively affected by the noise of human activity.

"Being on a boat and doing this activity reminded me of just how important it is to become a scientist and help animals," Ms. Scott says. "Everyone should experience science the way Dr. Curran taught us."

In the past year, Dr. Curran has traveled to the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind multiple times, presenting her multisensory activities in science classes. She also led a marsh expedition for 30 visually impaired eighth and ninth graders.

"Just because people have different ways of learning doesn't mean they aren't hungry to learn," says Dr. Curran, who notes, "My teaching at the university level now incorporates these sensory-based activities. Students from all backgrounds enjoy using 3D models and learning through touch and sound."

Embracing inclusive approaches that connect more students to science is also crucial in addressing global challenges like climate change.

"Diversity in science benefits everyone," Dr. Curran says. "Including people who think differently will actually accelerate the process of coming up with solutions to serious concerns like climate change. We must bring them to the table first."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sight unseen: This teacher brings science to life for blind students

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The gradual loss of Izzy Primeau's peripheral vision hasn't stopped her from pursuing a career in science. A college student, she's learning through her other senses. "It helps you remember and understand concepts better if you can feel models and build graphs," says Ms. Primeau, who is studying animal care.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
the tech empowering disabled people in cities - cnn

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The tech empowering disabled people in cities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From a smart walking stick to a stair-climbing wheelchair, these innovations are changing lives and urban landscapes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Video games are dominated by action-packed visuals, yet, there are visually impaired people all over the world playing them, ranging from the totally blind to the color blind. Now, gaming companies are working to make games more accessible.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

There are some video games that put an emphasis on the sound in your headset instead of all the action on the screen. The Nightjar, for example, is one that forces you to listen very carefully.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "THE NIGHTJAR")

BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH: (As Narrator) I'm going to walk you through that door, out of the airlock and back into the ship. Just relax.

KELLY: The audio-intensive experience makes it popular among people who are blind or visually impaired. Rachael Myrow of member station KQED reports that's a population the video game industry is beginning to focus on more.

RACHAEL MYROW, BYLINE: As surprising as it may seem, there are visually impaired people all over the world playing video games.

KAREN STEVENS: Just because a game isn't designed to be accessible doesn't mean people can't play it.

MYROW: Karen Stevens has spoken at San Francisco's Game Developer Conference for the last two years about accessibility. She's the sports accessibility lead at Electronic Arts. One of their most popular games is Madden NFL.

STEVENS: We figured out that there are probably about half a million colorblind Madden players.

MYROW: It's Stevens' job to make sure accessibility is baked in to product development from the start.

STEVENS: When I started my role, people were already playing EA games blind. They just didn't have any support. So they would struggle with things, but they would still play.

MYROW: Stevens' role is to provide that support with simple code changes like those that make brightness and contrast controls easier to adjust, bigger menu icons and color palettes that reflect the fact many people can't see reds and greens well. But some people need more than color adjustments. Marco Salsiccia of San Francisco is one. He lost his left eye to retinal cancer as a baby. And related complications took his right eye about four years ago. Among other things, the blindness ended his first career.

MARCO SALSICCIA: I was a motion graphics animator and a visual effects artist. So I worked on commercials, movies, corporate videos.

MYROW: Blindness also ended his enjoyment of visually immersive games like Madden NFL, Fortnite and the like. The games Salsiccia plays now are relatively simple ones he gets into in online game rooms playing with blind or otherwise visually impaired people from all over the world.

COMPUTER-GENERATED VOICE: Applications...

MYROW: That's his digital assistant reading off developments in the game as he makes his moves on the keyboard. He has it running at double speed because it takes less time.

SALSICCIA: Monopoly, UNO, Blackjack - but a lot of the games I've found that are accessible aren't necessarily immersive.

MYROW: Now, there are blind people who can game games that are primarily visual by paying close attention to verbal descriptions, music and even vibrations coming through the controller. There are also some newer games that give primacy to the audio experience, like The Nightjar, a sci-fi thriller set in outer space.

SALSICCIA: The whole experience of the game is narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch, so you have his voice in your ears guiding you through the game while your character is trying to escape a space station that's been overrun by aliens that's being sucked into the event horizon of a black hole.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME, "THE NIGHTJAR")

CUMBERBATCH: (As Narrator) Now walk to the door at the end of the corridor. Use your thumbs - left, right, left, right. Listen to your footsteps.

SALSICCIA: There are some games that almost hit that level of immersion, but there could be more.

MYROW: Nothing will perfectly replace the visceral delight Salsiccia used to get playing the most exciting games on the market. But with more attention from gaming companies, the technology is getting better with each passing year. For NPR News, I'm Rachel Myrow.

Copyright © 2018 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Video Game Companies Are Improving The Experience For Visually Impaired People

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Video games are dominated by action-packed visuals, yet, there are visually impaired people all over the world playing them, ranging from the totally blind to the color blind. Now, gaming companies are working to make games more accessible.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Keith Nolan always wanted to join the United States military. The challenge: he is Deaf, which is an automatic disqualification according to military rules. In this talk, he describes his fight to fight for his country. (In American Sign Language with real-time interpretation by Rita Alexander)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Aimee Mullins: The opportunity of adversity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The thesaurus might equate "disabled" with synonyms like "useless" and "mutilated," but ground-breaking runner Aimee Mullins is out to redefine the word. Defying these associations, she shows how adversity -- in her case, being born without shinbones -- actually opens the door for human potential.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Are we writing for other disabled people, for the nondisabled, or for everyone? The work of these poets speaks for itself.

By Khadijah Queen and

Ms. Queen and Dr. Weise are poets.

Sheila Smith, "Untitled" (2017), acrylic on canvas. Descriptive caption: An abstract landscape painted in broad strokes of blue, orange, red, with strings of floating dots in the foreground. Sheila Smith was born and raised in Patterson, Arkansas. She joined Project Onward in 2014 and lives in Oak Park. Credit... Courtesy of the artist and Project Onward

The seven poems you will find here below, as well as seven others that will follow in a second post, were curated by us over the past several months, and represent only a small segment of poets with disabilities writing vital, engaged and powerful work today. To arrive here, we asked many disabled poets to offer their work, and this process raised issues that permeate debates in the disability community. We learned that some poets prefer not to claim disability as an identity, publicly or at all, and because this is a "disability" series, those poets did not wish to offer their work. We were also faced with questions raised in the recent and provocative debate between "disability poetics" and "crip poetics": Who is the audience? Are we writing for other disabled people? For the nondisabled, or for everyone? How do we write for both while emphasizing the disabled poet's aesthetic?

Our goals here are many. In curating this group of poems, we want to show aesthetic range, thematic variety, and formal power. We don't want to repeat the ableist claims that appear so often in the media, even sometimes in this paper, that disability is a condition to be cured; Deafness is a condition to be cochlear-ed. These claims are ignorant of disability pride, Deaf pride, and our culture. In offering this work, we reject the stereotypes and misconceptions disabled people deal with every day from nondisabled people, and even from other disabled people. We refuse to box the poems in by requiring a fidelity to subject. It is enough that the poets say: I am disabled and/or Deaf. The poems can do anything.

We are grateful to Jennifer Bartlett and Peter Catapano, who edited the first poetry collection for this series in August 2018. We believe these poems express complexity, nuance, joy, tenderness, love, incisiveness and brilliance. We hope you will take them in, read them with the care with which they were written and selected, and understand that we disabled people do not just deserve or ask for the right to exist in this world with the same dignity and respect nondisabled people receive. We demand it.

This room's a long way from when I was the ice
blue shadow pooled inside a center
of gravity I left in the shape
of a body Shivering made
its own music Sirens chipped
bits from our borders Looped guts
were a harmonica Don't say we've nothing
to live for We are I go
back twenty kitchens
ago, stare out In my sleep Our skins rotate
toward sun A president is a boat
we didn't pay for We don't choose
to get on My mouth an
archipelago Your bones a school
of fish A country what won't unyoke
slicked in our floating rib That hook
shine's a lit kitchen from a frost-hard
road Built by slaves The smoke
of the world is never still My stomach full
of twigs cracking I mean I'm filling out
the forms Her bones glow under
ground The foxes are back Everything
might spill Sorry am I talking
too quiet too fast too [] A body drained
of a name again A name spilled
milk again Paper money We age stringing chair
to chair under florescence Office ER
laundromat Thus silver ripples
through generations You're just
another year moving through
like a cold front I'm just another name
for meat Last year crouched
under the newish war and chugged

for Monica

On the anniversary, I drive along a spine of mountains in an old blue truck through a purple desert, darkening indigo. My throat unrolls a fist of smoke. Around my wrist, a silver snake and when the pines appear, there you are among the long black trunks, storm-grey eyes. You wave in the door's mouth. A shepherd dog stands beside you. Your hair is longer now, and you're holding a knife, thumbing blades of aloe to take to your mother. You tell me I look dimmer, like the light in me is underwater. The same song and a pair of boots by the bed. You braid my hair at the table, ask about the baby. The windows reflect a photo that isn't there. I tell you about the miles of empty, broken chairs along the side of the road. You stack young firewood in the iron pit. We throw coins into the fire and talk on the porch through the night. In the canyons, wolf eyes like sapphires. I keep remembering the water is boiling. On the stove, a pot, filled with cold water. I put down the lid, but somehow, I know the phone is still ringing inside.

This is the good news: [inaudible]
& we have a plan for you. Can you follow

what I'm saying? Follow me. Bless you,
[inaudible], there's no need to [inaudible].

Doesn't this happen to you all the time?
[Inaudible]. I said step in here. Why would you-

copy. Copy that, I'm here with-yes I'm here
with [inaudible] now. Like I was saying before,

I'm not here to preach [inaudible]. You are
what you are. Even Jesus wasn't believed

& it's not like he could put some marker
on his drivers license. Have you had the [inaudible]?

My cousin had the [inaudible]. But the other
way. Spread your [inaudible]. A little farther

down the line & I would've been Paul
or [inaudible] back from his lunch break.

That's the power of [inaudible] right there.
Somebody's looking out for you today. Next time

you might not-[inaudible]. Copy. Copy
that. I'm going to place my fingers here & then

they need the room. [Inaudible]. Okay that's
enough. I need to go & tell them what I've seen.

the olives! they won't let them harvest the olives!
yes, if you want to kill a people you have to starve
the wallets too. yes, in the nice hotel in the airport
lounge my leather bag my headphones someone's
rent my skymiles & i feel it bubble. who cares
if the world ends if it ends over there? who cares
if the apocalypse after we fat on duck & gin? try again.

if god is the first mirror, i'll pay for my heaven in cash.
bet he say nigga with an -er
like i do, now.

To the blue sunrises when I hear her
voice in my ear, saying alcohol is
a depressant, there is a reason for
how low I feel. To the mornings I wish
a human into my bed, a cactus
onto my nightstand. To the early kind
of awareness, the graying skylit hush,
clouds, the vaguely hungover bodymind.
To the whole concept of mimosas, hair
of a classier dog than what I bit.
To teenage chaos, to the truth or dare
phase, the cigarettes we pre-New Year's lit
on the porch at that house party. It's all
a myth, this growing up thing, a close call.

Before the seventeenth century,
the English language had no noun
for comfort. No way to describe

that state of better-off-ness
for sleeping on a bed of hay
than on a bare plank. No word

to express how much that hay's
texture might be improved
without the creep of insect

or midnight scuttle of mouse.
Comfort was only a verb-to solace,
to strengthen, to give what aid

or blessing one could against
a hemorrhagic wound or lung
splitting with rot. To be

comfortable meant nothing beyond
able to bear someone else's idea
of help: the smoke of censer

at prayer, the crumbling wafer
of last rites-bodily gestures
that lead a spirit into the dark.

When the nurse cracks the door,
the thin wedge of light raking
at my eyes, reminding my body

that it is body still, she asks if I
am comfortable. I say yes, reach out
my silent hand for touch.

Make no apologies for yourself
Because you are covered by a listening skin
Because every ache you feel is not your own
Because of your mother's loss
and your father's rage
Because of how many rivers they've crossed
Because you plummet even if you cannot swim
Because of the lynching tree
Because when you enter bookstores
books fall off shelves into your open palms
Because you ask questions of the universe
so the world opens before you like a page of text
Because of those clouds and that murder of crows
Because poets are your wounded idols
Because the truth, even if it hurts is to be cherished and held
Because when people die you believe that they walk with you daily
Because the river has a mouth that speaks their names
Because the river flows with stories
Because you sit on the shore and listen
Because alone is more comforting than together
Because your pen is oceanic
Because you are big-eyed and eyes wide
Because you suffer from what you see and hear
Because you have sinus arrhythmia
your heart is linked to your breath
and your breath is short,
Because asthma is only one of the monkeys on your back
Because your heart is the vehicle you choose to ride this go 'round
Because it can go forward and backwards in time
Because bookstores have always been oracles
Because poetry is your archeological tool
Because you dig and dive
and you trust the ride of journal and journey
even if you don't always float
Because your heart beats to your breath
Because of this music, you dance raw and wild

Meg Day is the author of the book of poems " Last Psalm at Sea Level." They teach at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania.

Kelly Davio is the author of " Burn This House," " It's Just Nerves," and the forthcoming "The Book of the Unreal Woman." She is a medical editor who lives and works in London.

Nina Puro is the author of " Each Tree Could Hold a Noose or a House " and other books. They are a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative and a social worker.

Cade Leebron lives in Columbus, Ohio. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, American Literary Review, The Establishment, and elsewhere.

Khadijah Queen is the author of five books of poetry and hybrid prose, most recently " I'm So Fine: A List of Famous Men and What I Had On." She is currently working on a memoir.

Glenis Redmond is the author of two books of poetry, " What My Hand Say" and " Under the Sun." She is the poet-in-residence at The Peace Center in Greenville, S.C., and at the State Theatre in New Brunswick, N.J.

Danez Smith is the author of " Don't Call Us Dead" and the forthcoming " Homie." They live in Minneapolis.

Vanessa Angélica Villareal is the author of " Beast Meridian " and a doctoral student at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Jillian Weise is the author of four books, including the forthcoming collection of poems, " Cyborg Detective." She performs as the nondisabled writer Tipsy Tullivan across social media.
Artwork curated by Jim Datz
Disability is a series of essays, art and opinion by and about people living with disabilities. The entire series can be found here.
The Times is committed to publishing Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | 'Make No Apologies for Yourself'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Are we writing for other disabled people, for the nondisabled, or for everyone? The work of these poets speaks for itself. By Khadijah Queen and Ms. Queen and Dr. Weise are poets.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Disability

Credit... Dadu Shin

When I was in the third year of my medical residency, I was asked to evaluate a new state-of-the-art, fully accessible exam table that would be used in doctors' offices to better provide care for patients with mobility-related disabilities. The table could go as low as 18 inches off the ground to enable easier transfers for wheelchair users and had extra rails and grips to provide support for patients with impaired balance.

I was to assess this equipment as a "user expert." Although the table was designed to accommodate patients with disabilities, I rolled up to it to evaluate it from the perspective of a physician. "Do you want my opinion as a patient, or as a doctor?" I asked the surprised representatives from the medical equipment company.

I have been a wheelchair user since early childhood, when I sustained a spinal cord injury in a farming accident. I am now a practicing physician in the field of rehabilitation and sports medicine.

In my busy outpatient clinical practice, I witness the spectrum of patients' reactions when they find out that their doctor is, herself, disabled. Typically those first few seconds after entering an exam room - before the patient's guard goes up - are the most informative.

I find that these reactions are somewhat generational. Younger patients, having grown up amid a growing awareness of disability in society, typically do not react at all. They have clearly encountered empowered people with disabilities working in various professional roles. Older patients often seem confused, curious or, in rare circumstances, dismayed.

Several months ago, I wheeled into the room of an elderly woman. She looked at me, placed her hand on mine and, with a kind look asked, "Are you an invalid?" More recently, a jovial older man exclaimed, "You've got to be kidding me!" A few times, patients will hesitate to tell me their concerns, indicating "Well, doc, I feel bad complaining about this to you, when clearly your problems are bigger than mine."

Several years ago, while in my residency, I was in line at our hospital cafeteria. Although my badge reading "Dr. Blauwet" and stethoscope were clearly visible, a man next to me in line said: "You look like you are doing pretty well. When are you going to be discharged?" Clearly, my wheelchair was the only thing he saw. Moreover, he equated my wheelchair with illness, rather than empowerment.

Over the years, I've thought a lot about situations like these, and I do not believe they come so much from direct prejudice as from people's lack of experience with doctors who are also wheelchair users. A recent study revealed that less than 3 percent of medical school trainees are people with disabilities, and of these, only a small proportion are individuals with mobility impairment. How can we expect our patients or colleagues to know about the perspectives and needs of physicians with disabilities when we remain invisible to them?

The reason for this underrepresentation is complicated. Most physicians with mobility disabilities will tell you that the problem is not that we lack the ability to do our job competently. As with many other educated, skilled professionals, we know how to choose a path that suits our talents and abilities. Reasonable accommodations, such as the use of standing wheelchairs in the operating room, give us the access we need to do our work. The larger barrier to entry for prospective doctors with disabilities, however, is bias, both overt and hidden.

A colleague who is quadriplegic recounted a medical school admissions officer telling him, "I'm afraid that you will not meet the technical standards for admission." Although steeped in bias and probably illegal, this response was at least more direct than the more common form of discrimination where otherwise strong applicants with disabilities simply do not receive an interview or a call back. As our peers are accepted into prestigious schools and academic positions, we sit on the sidelines, left to question whether the fault lies with us or the system. Many give up their aspirations of a career in medicine altogether, electing to pursue work more "traditionally suited" for people with disabilities. Others lose sleep, questioning whether it was the right decision to disclose their disability in the application materials.

Anyone can enter, at any time, the minority group of people with disabilities. The most common cause of new, adult-onset disability is - simply put - aging. Physicians are often reluctant to disclose new-onset or progressive disability (like loss of hearing or vision, or reduced mobility) because of the fear of being stigmatized; medicine, after all, is still dominated by the prototype of physical prowess.

Dr. Lisa Iezzoni, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, has been an important mentor to me for many years. She recounted her experience as a medical student at Harvard in the early 1980s, a decade before the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act. In her first year at the medical school, after experiencing some physical and sensory symptoms, she was given a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Late in her third year, after a fall, she started using a cane, but her aspirations to pursue an internal medicine residency remained, despite the overt discouragement she received. At a student-faculty dinner, an influential professor told her: "There are too many doctors in the country right now for us to worry about training a handicapped physician. If that means someone gets left by the wayside, that's too bad."

The medical school refused to write a letter of recommendation for her residency application, so she could not pursue the training required for clinical practice. She pursued health policy research instead and became the first female professor of medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and now directs the Mongan Institute Health Policy Center at Massachusetts General Hospital. Despite having had an extraordinarily successful career, she sometimes wonders what could have been if she had been able to practice medicine.

My experience, more than two decades later, was vastly different. As an undergraduate at the University of Arizona, I became interested in applying to medical school. I investigated the application process and took coursework that would set me up for success. I studied, networked, did internships and engaged in various activities that would strengthen my application. Additionally, throughout this time, I nurtured my alter ego as an athlete, pursuing the sport of wheelchair racing, and ultimately represented the United States in three Paralympic Games.

In the fall of 2002, I applied to medical school, received interviews at several prestigious universities and was accepted to the Stanford University School of Medicine. Throughout this process, I never once feared that my disability would get in the way of success. I could focus on my academic performance rather than expending mental energy around concerns of hidden bias.

As a member of the "A.D.A. generation," I was blissfully ignorant that my visible disability could, in fact, derail my success. I simply assumed that I would be evaluated on merit, like my peers. (I also realized that my athletic success perhaps made me seem more "able.") I now understand the privilege of that perspective. I cannot completely separate my disability identity from my professional role.

People with disabilities often express fear or dissatisfaction with our health care system because they face poor access and discriminatory attitudes. This must change. Perhaps having more doctors with disabilities is one solution. As with any underrepresented group in medicine, professional diversity should reflect our population's diversity. That simple change can bring awareness, empathy and a shared experience that ultimately makes all of us better.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | I Use a Wheelchair. And Yes, I'm Your Doctor.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Disability When I was in the third year of my medical residency, I was asked to evaluate a new state-of-the-art, fully accessible exam table that would be used in doctors' offices to better provide care for patients with mobility-related disabilities.

# data[].attributes.body
He ends his piece with, 'What's Your Story?"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Disability

Credit... Dadu Shin

I tell my story a lot. I tell the story of how I wasn't always blind. I tell the story of how I lost my vision while serving in Afghanistan, by stepping on an I.E.D. I tell the story of how I put my own injury into perspective by considering the greater sacrifice of my fallen comrades, and how I owed it to them to make the most of my escape from death.

I tell the story of how I did that by winning a gold medal in swimming at the Paralympics on the first anniversary of the loss of my vision. And after I tell it, people often thank me. They tell me that it's an incredible story, and that I'm a good storyteller. They tell me how inspiring it is to see how I've overcome my blindness.

But that's not my whole story.

It's part of it, I suppose - in many ways, I have overcome my blindness. Five years after losing my sight, I have a rewarding job teaching leadership at the Naval Academy, a lovely house on a creek in historic Annapolis, Md., a loving family and a number of truly deep friendships. My quality of life is very high. Day to day, week to week, I don't find that my blindness is an obstacle.

What I haven't been able to overcome is how others perceive me and treat me differently now because of my blindness, or how I so often feel as if I'm on the outside listening in on the lives of others.

I hear people talk about how beautiful the sunrise is, but I no longer see it. I hear them talk about "Game of Thrones," but cannot watch it because HBO doesn't have descriptive audio for its shows. I can no longer share these very common experiences.

One thing I do often now is public talks about learning to navigate my new life without vision. But it's a one-way conversation. Afterward, I go to the airport where I'm reminded how hard it is to physically navigate a world not set up for people without vision. It's a pain to find assistance at the counter. It's a pain to get through security, which can't seem to distinguish dog food from explosives. It's a pain to get the airlines to move my seat to the bulkhead so there's room for my guide dog. Don't get me started on what a pain it is to find the bathroom for either of us.

I feel the looks of my fellow passengers, wondering what my story is, but too afraid to ask for fear of saying the wrong thing and offending me. I feel helpless, stared at like some sort of freak.

In my former life as an explosive ordnance disposal officer, I traveled through airports all over the world, from Baltimore to Prague to Baghdad to Kandahar and back, quickly, easily and anonymously. But traveling as I do now, with a cane and a guide dog, is anything but anonymous. At times, it has beaten me down.

At home, the inability to join my friends in their chatter about "Game of Thrones" or memes on Instagram has caused me to pull back. I decline invitations out to avoid the same alienating experience I've had a thousand times before. Whether I'm at a crowded bar, restaurant, sports event or concert, I'll be a spectacle, isolated by my inability to join the conversations of those around me.

No, thanks. I'll just stay home, in the quiet, where I know exactly where the bathroom is. I'll stay there until I have to hit the road again to tell my story of how I overcame blindness.

The irony used to make me chuckle.

A few years ago, after another frustrating trip through the airport, I settled into my seat bound for Dallas and did my best to disappear.

"That's an awfully nice watch you have there! I've never seen anything quite like it!" my neighbor said as she fastened her seatbelt.

A smile spread across my face. I love talking about my watch. It's a tactile timepiece that replaces traditional hour and minute hands with magnetic, rotating ball bearings so that blind folks like myself can literally tell the time through touch. It's superbly designed and very sharp-looking, so it appeals to those with vision too.

The timepiece - the Bradley by Eone - is actually named after me. It is accessible to people with or without disabilities. (I am a friend of the company's founder, Hyungsoo Kim, and receive a small percentage on sales of the watch.) I love explaining how the watch embodies the principles of inclusive design, which I am passionate about.

The conversation with my neighbor went on, and I explained how I lost my vision. I talked about how I had been able to adapt, how I try to maintain perspective and how I felt as though I had overcome my blindness.

Then my neighbor shared her own fights. She had lost her husband a few years ago, and during her grief had gained weight. She had been struggling with her weight ever since, and it had begun to interfere with her quality of life. I told her how sometimes I felt isolated by my disability, and she relayed that she felt constrained by her weight. I shared how I sometimes feel that I'm an outsider, and she echoed the same.

For the first time in a while, I didn't feel like a spectacle or an outcast. I felt like a friend, and an important part of someone else's journey. I felt valued, needed and involved, and all it took was a conversation. I realized that I'm not alone in being alone.

Sometimes people ask me what I want others to know about being blind. I want others to feel more comfortable having conversations with people whose experiences are different from their own. My watch has been a natural opener, and once that conversation starts, we usually discuss topics far beyond timepieces and disabilities. Through talking, we find humanity.

It seems like we could all use a little more humanity right now. I know it's tough for many to have conversations with people so different from themselves, to risk feeling uncomfortable or giving offense, to find common ground, to listen to another's struggles, to share your own struggles in return. But you might be surprised what you get out of it - and what you realize you've given in return.

How do we do it? It all starts with a conversation.

What's your story?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | How to Really See a Blind Person

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Disability I tell my story a lot. I tell the story of how I wasn't always blind. I tell the story of how I lost my vision while serving in Afghanistan, by stepping on an I.E.D.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The blue and white wheelchair icon is more than a guide to parking spots and ramps. It allows millions to fully participate in society.

By

Ms. Guffey is a professor of art and design history.

Credit... Brian Funck

I was 12 years old when I first encountered the blue wheelchair symbol. I still remember sitting in our family car on that hot Southern California afternoon in 1975 as my mother pulled into the department store parking lot. Something was wrong. The cars were all parked in the wrong places. Then, as we drove near the store's front door, we saw a new set of neatly painted blue and white lines on the pavement, and a little wheelchair symbol stenciled on each space. The rest of the parking lot was filled, but these spaces were all conspicuously empty.

I especially remember the comments that came after the new spaces arrived. "It's such a shame," our neighbor told my mother one day. "It used to be if you arrived early enough you could count on getting a parking space in front of the store. Now nobody can use them." Later I wondered, who is "nobody"?

I was born with cerebral palsy. At that point I had never used a wheelchair, but as soon as I saw that figure, I knew instinctively that it was a friend and an ally. Whatever my neighbor or other people said, the little figure was whispering a message of inclusion directly to me.

To this day, I have a complicated relationship with wheelchairs. I did not use one at all until my 40s, when I first visited the New York Maker Faire in Queens, N.Y., and my wheelchair use remains peripatetic. Even so, I've long recognized this symbol as a kind of lifeline that allows me to participate in and contribute to larger society. Like many disabled people, I was born with a body that allows partial mobility. As a child, I used heavy braces and special orthotic shoes, and I've always found it challenging to merely move across a room. I fall frequently, and my injuries have included concussions, broken teeth and sprained limbs. Despite these setbacks, the symbol has guided me through places, and pointed out spaces that are safe.

This month, the "wheelchair symbol," formally known as the International Symbol of Access, turned 50. It's an occasion worth celebrating.

The original symbol was conceived by Susanne Koefoed, a Danish design student during the turbulent summer of 1968 - a year now remembered for social upheavals like the resistance in Prague, the strikes in Paris and the raised fists of black American athletes at the Mexico City Olympics. In the student-led design workshop in Stockholm that she was attending, Koefoed planted the seed for another sort of revolution when she came up with an idea for common signage to guide disabled people to accessible facilities. She drew a schematic wheelchair.

The icon spent a brief childhood in Sweden in the months after this workshop, where it could be seen around traffic intersections in Stockholm's center and at the city's new international airport. That same year, the symbol was adopted by the well-connected nonprofit organization Rehabilitation International. Global in reach, and with deep pockets, Rehabilitation International hoped to promote the symbol through its many media and political connections. The effort stalled, however, until officials made a simple modification - they placed a circle on top of the wheelchair's back, transforming it into an image of a person sitting in a wheelchair.

The symbol really took off in 1974, when the United Nations approved it as a key component of barrier-free design. Officially rendered in the now-familiar blue and white, the international convention for roadside amenities, the little icon became a familiar sight in parking lots, restrooms, ramps and other public places across the globe. In 1990, when President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans With Disabilities Act into law, the "wheelchair symbol" came to legally identify a host of standardized accommodations for disabled people. By this time, it was one of the most recognized symbols in the world. In the United States, it is now accepted as legal signage and can be found on road signs, disabled parking tags and other official documents across the 50 states.

In recent years, a number of designers have reimagined the wheelchair symbol. In 2011, Sara Hendren and Brian Glenney redesigned the symbol as part of their Accessible Icon Project in a way that refects the wider public understanding of members of the disabled community as people who play dynamic, active roles in public life. Their design pushes the figure out of its familiar sedentary stance. It depicts a wheelchair user leaning purposefully, even forcefully forward, setting it all in motion, as though racing through traffic or over a finish line. This newer symbol is now legally accepted in New York and Connecticut as a replacement for the older icon.

It's been years since I first heard my neighbor openly complain about the wheelchair symbol, or the accommodations it is meant to provide. Today, I recognize that even then, the little figure was moonlighting. Yes, its official job remains to identify facilities and guide disabled people to ramps, automated doors or larger toilet stalls. But it also reminds us that access to buses and trains, entry to stores and classrooms, and the enjoyment of parks and pools is a legal right shared by everyone - disabled or not. And it reminds us of our fundamental obligation to support one another and to continue building the barrier-free society that we know we can build.

We can also happily note that my neighbor was wrong: The wheelchair symbol is not a design for nobody. It actually belongs to all of us.

Elizabeth Guffey is a professor of art and design history at Purchase College, State University of New York, and the author of "Designing Disability: Symbols, Spaces and Society."
Disability is a series of essays, art and opinion by and about people living with disabilities. The entire series can be found Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter. here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | A Symbol for 'Nobody' That's Really for Everybody

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The blue and white wheelchair icon is more than a guide to parking spots and ramps. It allows millions to fully participate in society. By Ms. Guffey is a professor of art and design history. I was 12 years old when I first encountered the blue wheelchair symbol.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | Hiring People With Disabilities Is Good Business (Published 2018)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Microsoft, Bank of America and CVS are just a few big companies that profit from their proactive employment practices.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At times it caused suffering, but it also gave me a passion for words and language.

By

Ms. Steinke is an author.

Video

Back

transcript

Darcey Steinke Records the Audio Version of "Flash Count Diary"

Ms. Steinke recorded the audio version her forthcoming book in her own voice.

Fish, according to historians, were one of the few animals not suspected as a witch's familiar. Women could be accused of witchcraft for being too friendly with their cats. If a woman was seen talking to or looking at ferrets, hedgehogs, mice, rats, rabbits, squirrels, weasels, snakes, owls, or insects, then that woman was a witch. One witch supposedly kept bees under a rock and called them out so they could drink blood from her pricked finger. Women in the 16th and 17th centuries, according to sources, could be accused of witchcraft if they begged at their neighbor's wedding for a pitcher of milk, if they crashed a wedding and asked for a sausage, if their plants were taller than their male neighbors, or if they were better at steering their plows than were their male neighbors. If when a woman pulled a blanket down from a shelf a toad jumped out, then she was a witch.

Ms. Steinke recorded the audio version her forthcoming book in her own voice. Credit Credit... The New York Times

The J in "juice" was the first letter-sound, according to my mother, that I repeated in staccato, going off like a skipping record. This was when I was 3, before my stutter was stigmatized as shameful. In those earliest years my relationship to language was uncomplicated: I assumed my voice was more like a bird's or a squirrel's than my playmates'. This seemed exciting. I imagined, unlike fluent children, I might be able to converse with wild creatures, I'd learn their secrets, tell them mine and forge friendships based on interspecies intimacy.

School put an end to this fantasy. Throughout elementary school I stuttered every time a teacher called on me and whenever I was asked to read out loud. In the third grade the humiliation of being forced to read a few paragraphs about stewardesses in the Weekly Reader still burns. The ST is hard for stutterers. What would have taken a fluent child five minutes took me an excruciating 25.

It was around this time that I started separating the alphabet into good letters, V as well as M, and bad letters, S, F and T, plus the terrible vowel sounds, open and mysterious and nearly impossible to wrangle. Each letter had a degree of difficulty that changed depending upon its position in the sentence. Much later when I read that Nabokov as a child assigned colors to letters, it made sense to me that the hard G looked like "vulcanized rubber" and the R, "a sooty rag being ripped." My beloved V, in the Nabokovian system, was a jewel-like "rose quartz."

My mother, knowing that kids ridiculed me - she once found a book, "The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot," that had been tossed onto our lawn - wanted to eradicate my speech impediment. She encouraged me to practice the strategies taught to me by a string of therapists, bouncing off an easy sound to a harder one and unclenching my throat, trying to slide out of a stammer. When I was 13 she got me a scholarship to a famous speech therapy program at a college near our house in Virginia.

Image

The author, 6, with her mother, Paige Phelps, in Southington, Conn.

For three weeks that summer I sat in a small room at a table with a voice monitor, a black metal box with a light that would turn from green to red if I made a hard onset, forcing air out of my mouth too quickly. In front of me was a thick workbook, filled with pages of single letters, letter groups and words. I said each a hundred times using the program's method of not pushing air out, but gently moving into each initial sound. If the light turned red, I had to start all over. After days filled with hours of repetition (lob-ster - lob-ster - lob-ster - lob-ster) my mind unfocused and I floated up, watching the skinny, pathetic girl in the sundress and tire-tread sandals trying so desperately to find a little grace.

Flash forward 25 years. After a plethora of speech therapy, my stutter was less disruptive; I moved through the world trying to pass as a fluent person, one unmarred by disability. Whenever I stuttered, I disassociated: That struggling human was not me. This strategy mostly worked until one night I found myself at a party in Brooklyn surrounded by people freely and flamboyantly stuttering. I discovered that the party host was the editor of a stuttering newsletter and that many of the partygoers were members of the local chapter of the Stuttering Association of America. When I mentioned that I attended the speech program in Virginia, our host told me that the program's therapies are considered invasive, even cruel. Nowadays stutterers get therapy to stutter more comfortably, not to obliterate their stutter.

I realized as I listened to one after another tell their stories that they were not impressed with my fluency. No. They felt sorry for me. Having tamped down my speech, I will never really know who I am.

This paradigm shift blew my mind. It had never occurred to me to tell myself the way I spoke was O.K., it's the fluent world that needed to practice acceptance. When I watched "The King's Speech," a film about King George VI's stutter, I didn't buy the triumphant ending, when, with the help of his speech therapist Lionel Logue, the king delivers with fluency his announcement that Britain will enter World War II. The actual meaning and glory in the film, I realized, occurs between the king and Logue inside their sessions. The king exposes his vulnerability and Logue reacts not with judgment or disgust but compassion. For the first time the king is seen.

Finally I get it: Stuttering is a violent incantation that can break open normal conversation. What happens in that breach is up to the stutterer and her listener.

I was reminded of this not long ago, as I sat inside a sound booth in front of a microphone just as huge and intimidating as any in "The King's Speech," preparing to record the audio edition for my forthcoming book "Flash Count Diary." I was anxious. Because of my stutter, I wasn't sure that I could. Conversing, teaching, even reading out loud were all part of everyday discourse, but recording an audiobook would take me into the world of professional oratory - a world, I assumed, from which I'd always be excluded.

As I started to read, I remembered again my complete defenselessness before the incomprehensible force of language. I had no control over my vocal cords, adrift on waves of unpredictable sound. This loss of control was scary but also thrilling, even ecstatic. Time after time I hesitated or stuttered and had to start over, going back to the top of the sentence. The young sound engineer was patient. His voice in my earphones was gentle and his expression open and empathetic. Afterward we talked frankly. I explained that in the classroom as I teach and at my readings, my stutter brought intimacy to my listeners. He nodded. "They can hear your vulnerability." We agreed that while it might take twice as long for me to record my book, I could do it. Also in the final edit, he promised to include at least some of my repetitions and silences.

The central irony of my life remains that my stutter, which at times caused so much suffering, is also responsible for my obsession with language. Without it I would not have been driven to write, to create rhythmic sentences easier to speak and to read. A fascination with words thrust me into a vocation that has kept me aflame with a desire to communicate. As a little girl, I hoped my stutter would let me into the secret world of animals. As an adult, given a kind listener, I am privy to something just as elusive: a direct pathway to the human heart.

Darcey Steinke is the author of five novels and two memoirs, including the forthcoming " Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life."
Disability is a series of essays, art and opinion by and about people living with disabilities. The Times is committed to publishing Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com. Coming soon in print: "About Us: Essays From the New York Times Disability Series," edited by Peter Catapano and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, published by Liveright.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | My Stutter Made Me a Better Writer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At times it caused suffering, but it also gave me a passion for words and language. By Ms. Steinke is an author. The J in "juice" was the first letter-sound, according to my mother, that I repeated in staccato, going off like a skipping record.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
subscribe to The NPR Politics Podcast podcast

Minority groups often object to, and then change, the words that are used to describe them. That's been true, too, for people with mental retardation. In the past, they've been called by some ugly words: idiot, moron, feeble-minded. And those were official and legal definitions.

The term mental retardation was supposed to be an improvement. But the fight over language keeps going on. That becomes clear if you ask those with mental retardation what they think about that description.

"I hate that word - mental retardation," says Thelma Greene of Washington, D.C. "I wish they would change that one, because it sounds so institutional, like you can't do nothing for yourself and you're depending on somebody else to do everything, from putting on all your clothes down to your shoes. And that's not right."

"Retardation is not the good word," Anthony Vessels, also of Washington, says in agreement.

"I never did like that word 'retardation' or 'mental retardation,' adds Victor Robinson. "Because everyone has called people names about that. And no, none of my friends did like that name or any other name, being called 'stupid, dumb.' And it hurts a person very much."

Sometimes it helps to have the label of mental retardation. It is a diagnosis that leads to services, such as special education, job support and housing.

But it is also commonplace to hear the term, especially its abbreviations, "retarded" or "retard," used as an insult in schools, movies and music.

"Some people who are kind of nasty, they would make fun of you and play at, you know with you and make you look like if you are a stupid person," says Robinson. "But a person who has a disability is not that. They are very wise on some things, and they can be very knowledgeable about some things."

Nancy Ward, who has mental retardation, works for a group of disability attorneys in Oklahoma City. She says there's a lot more to her than that label. She says her work and her hobbies define her, not her IQ.

The definition of who has mental retardation iosn't precise; it's not like determing a person's blood type. Officially, anyone with an IQ of 70 or under is considered to have mental retardation. A generation ago, the official definition applied to IQs under 85. And other things are measured, including how well a person functions in the world.

There have long been attempts to replace the term "mental retardation" with something more friendly. But Ward hasn't liked most of them.

The term "mentally challenged"? "I think it's just another label," she says, "Because what does that mean? How does that define us? It doesn't define us."

Nor does she like the term "special."

"I don't want to be treated any different than anybody else," she says. "I want to have, you know, the same consequences for my actions that somebody else would have."

Ward adds that there are people who can't understand actions and consequences.

"If somebody didn't understand that, then I don't think it's fair for them to have consequences," she says. "But I would understand stuff."

Most people with mental retardation, such as Ward, have mild mental retardation. Many push for change. They serve on various boards, including those for government agencies and for organizations of the professionals who work with people with mental retardation.

On Jan. 1, 2007, the nation's oldest group in the field, The American Association on Mental Retardation, took on a new name: The American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.

Hank Bersani Jr., the group's president, said the name change showed that the professionals in the organization were listening to the concerns of the people they serve. But he notes that it was easier to agree to dump the term "mental retardation" from the group's name than to reach a consensus on the best replacement.

At a recent national convention of TASH (formerly The Association of the Severely Handicapped), a group of people with developmental disabilities gathered to discuss the language used to describe them. They applauded the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities for taking "mental retardation" out of its name. But they weren't so sure about the new term, "intellectual disability."

"When you talk about intellectual disabilities, that make you sound like you're dumb," says Lucius Mangrum Jr., a member of the Washington, D.C.-based self-advocacy group Project ACTION!.

Bersani, who is also a professor of special education at Western Oregon University, says he is not surprised that there's less consensus about replacing mental retardation with intellectual disability.

"Right, they said they don't like that either," he said, when told of the response by the group at the convention. "And so then I say to them, 'Well, what would you like to be called?' And they usually say their first name: 'I'd like to be called Liz.' 'I'd like to be called Rafael.' And that's what's really important. One of the things that they are telling us, in their own way, is that we spend too much time thinking about them by their diagnosis."

But the term mental retardation isn't going away - not yet. Even though Bersani's group has changed its own name, the legal name of the disability is still mental retardation.

Lucius Mangrum says it's going to take more than a word change to make a real difference in his life.

"Changing the word could possibly make it better," he says. "But also you got to change the attitudes. You know, because the attitudes is not changed, the word is not really going to matter. I don't look down on myself. I don't think anybody's better than me or less than me. You see, but others, they do see themselves as being better."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Label Falls Short for Those with Mental Retardation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
People with mental retardation were once legally defined with the terms idiot, moron or feeble-minded. But they say the current term, mental retardation isn't acceptable either. Debate continues over how to define the disability, and the people concerned say that any attempt to label them will fall short.

# data[].attributes.body
This article is long-- and fascinating! Challenge yourself.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The first thing Daniel Kish does, when I pull up to his tidy gray bungalow in Long Beach, California, is make fun of my driving. "You're going to leave it that far from the curb?" he asks. He's standing on his stoop, a good 10 paces from my car. I glance behind me as I walk up to him. I am, indeed, parked about a foot and a half from the curb.

The second thing Kish does, in his living room a few minutes later, is remove his prosthetic eyeballs. He does this casually, like a person taking off a smudged pair of glasses. The prosthetics are thin convex shells, made of acrylic plastic, with light brown irises. A couple of times a day they need to be cleaned. "They get gummy," he explains. Behind them is mostly scar tissue. He wipes them gently with a white cloth and places them back in.

Kish was born with an aggressive form of cancer called retinoblastoma, which attacks the retinas. To save his life, both of his eyes were removed by the time he was 13 months old. Since his infancy - Kish is now 44 - he has been adapting to his blindness in such remarkable ways that some people have wondered if he's playing a grand practical joke. But Kish, I can confirm, is completely blind.

He knew my car was poorly parked because he produced a brief, sharp click with his tongue. The sound waves he created traveled at a speed of more than 1,000 feet per second, bounced off every object around him, and returned to his ears at the same rate, though vastly decreased in volume.

But not silent. Kish has trained himself to hear these slight echoes and to interpret their meaning. Standing on his front stoop, he could visualize, with an extraordinary degree of precision, the two pine trees on his front lawn, the curb at the edge of his street, and finally, a bit too far from that curb, my rental car. Kish has given a name to what he does - he calls it "FlashSonar" - but it's more commonly known by its scientific term, echolocation.

Bats, of course, use echolocation. Beluga whales too. Dolphins. And Daniel Kish. He is so accomplished at echolocation that he's able to pedal his mountain bike through streets heavy with traffic and on precipitous dirt trails. He climbs trees. He camps out, by himself, deep in the wilderness. He's lived for weeks at a time in a tiny cabin a two-mile hike from the nearest road. He travels around the globe. He's a skilled cook, an avid swimmer, a fluid dance partner. Essentially, though in a way that is unfamiliar to nearly any other human being, Kish can see.

This is not enough for him. Kish is seeking - despite a lack of support from every mainstream blind organization in America - nothing less than a profound reordering of the way the world views blind people, and the way blind people view the world. He's tired of being told that the blind are best served by staying close to home, sticking only to memorized routes, and depending on the unreliable benevolence of the sighted to do anything beyond the most routine of tasks.

Kish preaches complete and unfettered independence, even if the result produces the occasional bloody gash or broken bone. (He once fractured the heel of his left foot after leaping from a rock and has broken a couple of teeth.) He's regarded by some in the blind community with deep veneration. Others, like a commenter on the National Federation of the Blind 's listserv, consider him "disgraceful" for promoting behavior such as tongue clicking that could be seen as off-putting and abnormal.

Kish and a handful of coworkers run a nonprofit organization called World Access for the Blind, headquartered in Kish's home. World Access offers training on how to gracefully interact with one's environment, using echolocation as a primary tool. So far, in the decade it has existed, the organization has introduced more than 500 students to echolocation. Kish is not the first blind person to use echolocation, but he's the only one to meticulously document it, to break it down into its component parts, and to figure out how to teach it. His dream is to help all sight-impaired people see the world as clearly as he does.

It begins with the lid of a pot. "Stand up," Kish instructs, then guides me to the center of his living room and ties a blindfold around my head, while mentioning, in a schoolteachery tone, that I should not for an instant think that wearing a blindfold represents the experience of being blind. A blindfold almost always causes someone who can see to feel frightened, confused, and disoriented. Kish is none of these things.

"Now wait here," he says. Though he was born and raised in Southern California, Kish has an odd, almost foreign-sounding accent - a bouillabaisse of Canadian, British, and relaxed Los Angeleno. He says it's a result of his many travels. "I'm a natural mimic," he explains. Kish is 5-foot-7, thin and fit, with an impressive mane of dark brown hair and a meandering winestain birthmark on his left cheek.

I hear him walk into his kitchen, his bare feet padding faintly on the hardwood floor. "I'm very particular about feeling life and air around my feet," he once wrote in the journal he braille-typed and shared with me. I'm barefoot as well. Kish asked me to remove my shoes, which is one of his many little rules you quickly learn to adopt. Like: He's Daniel Kish, and anyone who calls him "Dan" more than once may be struck with withering disdain. And don't disturb him during his sleep time - lately, he's been sleeping just two hours twice a day, usually from 5 to 7 in the morning and again from 5 to 7 in the evening. He often stays up all night dealing with World Access logistics. He lives alone and does not have a significant other. He plays a lot of Celtic hymnal music.

I listen as Kish opens a cabinet and rummages amid his pots. He returns and stands behind me. "Make a click," he says.

It's a terrible click, a sloppy click; what Kish calls a "clucky click." Kish's click is a thing of beauty - he snaps the tip of his tongue briefly and firmly against the roof of his mouth, creating a momentary vacuum that pops upon release, a sound very much like pushing the igniter on a gas stove. A team of Spanish scientists recently studied Kish's click and deemed it acoustically ideal for capturing echoes. A machine, they wrote, could do no better.

My click will work for now. Kish tells me that he's holding a large glass lid, the top to a Crock-Pot, a few inches in front of me. "Click again," he says. There's a distinct echo, a smearing of sound as if I'm standing in my shower. "Now click," he says. The echo's gone. "I've lifted it up. Can you tell?"

I can, quite clearly. "Click again," he instructs. "Where is it?" I click; there's no echo.

"It's still lifted," I say.

"Try again," says Kish. "But move your head, listen to your environment."

I turn my head to the right and click. Nothing. Then I click to the left. Bingo. "It's over here," I say, tilting my head in the direction of the lid.

"Exactly," says Kish. "Now let's try it with a pillow."

There are two reasons echolocation works. The first is that our ears, conveniently, are located on both sides of our head. When there's a noise off to one side, the sound reaches the closer ear about a millisecond - a thousandth of a second - before it reaches the farther ear. That's enough of a gap for the auditory cortex of our brain to process the information. It's rare that we turn the wrong way when someone calls our name. In fact, we're able to process, with phenomenal accuracy, sounds just a few degrees off-center. Having two ears, like having two eyes, also gives us the auditory equivalent of depth perception. We hear in stereo 3-D. This allows us, using only our ears, to build a detailed map of our surroundings.

The second reason echolocation works is that humans, on average, have excellent hearing. We hear better than we see. Much better. On the light spectrum, human eyes can perceive only a small sliver of all the varieties of light - no ultraviolet, no infrared. Converting this to sound terminology, we can see less than one octave of frequency. We hear a range of 10 octaves.

We can also hear behind us; we can hear around corners. Sight can't do this. Human hearing is so good that if you have decent hearing, you will never once in your life experience true silence. Even if you sit completely still in a soundproof room, you will detect the beating of your own heart.

Kish does not go around clicking like a madman. He uses his click sparingly and, depending on his location, varies the volume. When he's outside, he'll throw a loud click. In good conditions, he can hear a building 1,000 feet away, a tree from 30 feet, a person from six feet. Up close, he can echolocate a one-inch diameter pole. He can tell the difference between a pickup truck, a passenger car, and an SUV. He can locate trail signs in the forest, then run his finger across the engraved letters and determine which path to take. Every house, he explains, has its own acoustic signature.

He can hear the variation between a wall and a bush and a chain-link fence. Bounce a tennis ball off a wall, Kish says, then off a bush. Different response. So too with sound. Given a bit of time, he can echolocate something as small as a golf ball. Sometimes, in a parking garage, he can echolocate the exit faster than a sighted person can find it.

I accompanied Kish on several occasions as he cruised the busy streets of Long Beach. The outside world is an absolute cacophony. Every car, person, dog, stroller, and bicycle makes a sound. So do gusts of wind, bits of blowing garbage, and rustling leaves. Doors open and close. Change jangles. People talk. Then there are the silent obstacles - what Kish calls urban furniture: benches, traffic signs, telephone poles, postal boxes, fire hydrants, light posts, parked vehicles. Kish hears the sonic reflections from his click even in a place teeming with ambient noise. "It's like recognizing a familiar voice in a crowd," he says. The load upon his mind is undoubtedly immense. Yet he casually processes everything, constructing and memorizing a mental map of his route, all while maintaining an intricate conversation with me. It's so extraordinary that it seems to border on the magical.

When we walk into a restaurant - never a simple choice with Kish, since he's a strict vegan - he makes a much quieter click. Kish describes the images he receives as akin to a brief flick of the lights in a dark room; you get enough essential information - tables here, stairway there, support pillars here - to navigate your way through. "It becomes as ridiculous for blind people to run into a wall as it is for sighted people," he once wrote in his FlashSonar manual. He strolls casually across the restaurant, making one or two more clicks as we approach our table, then sits down. It's both smooth and subtle. Kish says that it is rare a sighted person even notices he's making an unusual noise. Almost all blind people instantly do.

What people do notice about Kish is his long white cane. His blind person's cane. Using echolocation, Kish could get around without one. For most of his youth, in fact, he never carried a cane, seeking to avoid the stigma attached to it. Now, as he approaches middle age, he's come to believe that whatever can conveniently provide him with more information about his environment he will use. Echolocation's chief liability is that it is not good at detecting holes in the ground, or small dropoffs, which a cane can do. There are also some figure-ground issues with echolocation - a park bench can "disappear" when it's directly in front of a stone wall - and a cane, in essence, increases the length of your arm by as much as five feet.

Kish also keeps aware, during the day, of where the sun is striking him - a good way to determine direction - and how the cracks between sidewalk blocks line up; if you remain steadily perpendicular to them, you're not veering.

When it's all put together, says Kish, he has very rich, very detailed pictures in his head.

"In color?" I ask.

"No," he says. "I've never seen color, so there's no color. It's more like a sonar, like on the Titanic."

Kish can hardly remember a time when he didn't click. He came to it on his own, intuitively, at age two, about a year after his second eye was removed. Many blind children make noises in order to get feedback - foot stomping, finger snapping, hand clapping, tongue clicking. These behaviors are the beginnings of echolocation, but they're almost invariably deemed asocial by parents or caretakers and swiftly extinguished. Kish was fortunate that his mother never tried to dissuade him from clicking. "That tongue click was everything to me," he says.

He has a vivid recollection of sneaking out his bedroom window in the middle of the night, at age two and a half, and climbing over a fence into his neighbor's yard. "I was in the habit of exploring whatever I sensed around me," he writes in his journal. He soon wondered what was in the yard of the next house. And the one after that. "I was on the other side of the block before someone discovered me prowling around their backyard and had the police return me home to completely flummoxed parents."

Kish was born in Montebello, California, into a difficult family situation. His younger brother, Keith, was also born with retinoblastoma - it's genetic, though neither of Kish's parents had the disease. Doctors managed to save enough of Keith's eyesight so that he doesn't need echolocation. He's now a middle school English teacher. Kish's father, who worked as an automobile mechanic, was a physically abusive alcoholic, and his mother left him when Kish was six.

"I was a violent kid," says Kish. He frequently got into fistfights. "I rarely lost. My strategy consisted of immobilizing opponents before they could hit me too often." He went to mainstream schools and relied almost exclusively on echolocation to orient himself, though at the time neither he nor his mom had any concept of what he was doing. "There was no one to explain it, there was no one to help me enhance it, and we all just kind of took it for granted," he says. "My family and friends were like, 'Yeah, he does this funny click thing and he gets around.'" They called it his radar. Navigating new places, he says, was like solving a puzzle.

He rode his bike with wild abandon. "I used to go to the top of a hill and scream 'Dive bomb!' and ride down as fast as I could," he says. This is when he was eight. The neighborhood kids would scatter. "One day I lost control of the bicycle, crashed through these trash cans, and smashed into a metal light pole. It was a violent collision. I had blood all over my face. I picked myself up and went home."

He was raised with almost no dispensation for his blindness. "My upbringing was all about total self-reliance," he writes, "of being able to go after anything I desired." His career interests, as a boy, included policeman, fireman, pilot, and doctor. He was a celebrated singer and voracious consumer of braille books. He could take anything apart and put it back together - a skill he retains. Once, when I was driving Kish to an appointment with a student, the GPS unit in my car stopped working. Kish examined the unit with his hands, instructed me from the passenger seat how to get to the nearest Radio Shack, and told me which part to buy (the jack on the power cord was faulty). He was named "best brain" in middle school and graduated high school with a GPA close to 4.0. He was voted "most likely to succeed."

He attended the University of California Riverside, then earned two master's degrees - one in developmental psychology, one in special education. He wrote a thesis on the history and science of human echolocation, and as part of that devised one of the first echolocation training programs. The ability of some blind individuals to perceive objects well before they could touch them was noted as early as 1749 by French philosopher Denis Diderot. He theorized it had something to do with vibrations against the skin of the face. In the early 1800s, a blind man from England named James Holman journeyed around the world - he may have been the most prolific traveler in history up to that point, Magellan and Marco Polo included - relying on the echoes from the click of his cane. Not until the 1940s, in Karl Dallenbach's lab at Cornell University, was it irrefutably proven that humans could echolocate.

The thesis was the first time Kish really studied what he'd been doing all his life; it was the beginning, as he put it, of "unlocking my own brain." He then became the first totally blind person in the United States (and likely the world) to be fully certified as an orientation and mobility specialist - that is, someone hired by the visually impaired to learn how to get around.

It was never Kish's goal to run a foundation dedicated to the blind. He planned to be a psychologist. But he could not ignore the fact that few blind people enjoyed anything close to his freedom of movement, and he had grown weary of society's attitude toward the blind. "I am belittled, patronized, disrespected, invaded, restricted, and presumed weak, vulnerable, or otherwise incapacitated," he wrote in his journal. It still drives him crazy when he's congratulated for simply crossing the street or preparing dinner.

In a letter he posted on his website a few years ago, Kish responded to a public school program in New Jersey called Kindness Beats Blindness, in which hundreds of middle school students were blindfolded while others led them around, to develop sympathy for the blind. "I have felt beaten and pummeled by many things," he wrote, "misplaced kindness foremost among them." When I asked Kish about the letter he said, "I have a reputation for being a pain in the ass." One of his closest friends sometimes refers to him as "the bridge burner."

Young people, says Kish, are especially hard-hit. "Most blind kids hear a lot of negative talk. 'Don't do this, don't do that, don't move. No, here, let me help you.' The message you get, if you're blind, is you're intellectually deficient, you're emotionally deficient, you're in all ways deficient." A few sighted people have commented to Kish that they'd rather be dead than blind.

So in 2001 he started World Access for the Blind. One of its missions is to counter every no that blind people hear. Blindness, Kish says, should be understood - by both the blind and the sighted - as nothing more than an inconvenience. "Most of my life," he writes, "I never even thought of myself as blind. In fact, I saw myself as smarter, more agile, stronger, and generally more capable than most other boys my age."

World Access operates on what Kish calls "an annual budget of silliness" - less than $200,000 a year. (Kish himself makes only "a survival wage.") He depends on the "blind vine," the chattery network of the visually impaired, to spread the word. When a potential student, or a parent of a student, agrees to hire World Access, either Kish or one of three other World Access teachers - all blind or visually impaired - will pay a visit, whether it's on the other side of Los Angeles or the other side of the world.

Lessons can consist of private meetings a few times a month, or an intensive week of training for students farther afield. He's visited a group of blind students in northern Mexico three times and traveled to Scotland eight times. In all, Kish has taught in 14 countries, including Armenia, South Africa, Switzerland, and Ukraine. Blind students or organizations in more than a dozen other nations, from Afghanistan to Guatemala, are now on his waiting list. The chief focus of World Access classes is setting students on the path to complete autonomy. Echolocation is an essential element of what Kish terms "a holistic approach" that also includes lessons on comfortable social interactions, confident self-image, and nonvisual conversational cues (a head turn can be noted by the sound of hair swishing; arm gestures by the whisper of skin brushing against clothing; the shift of someone's body by the creaking of furniture).

World Access doesn't turn anyone away for lack of resources. But there are a couple of reasons why the organization hasn't trained more students. The first is Kish's general ethos about how blind children should be raised. "Running into a pole is a drag, but never being allowed to run into a pole is a disaster," he writes. "Pain is part of the price of freedom." This attitude is not wildly popular, especially in a safety-first nation like the United States. Also, echolocation is not easy to master. Kish compares it with piano lessons - anyone can learn basics; very few will make it to Carnegie Hall. Only about 10 percent of the people who learn echolocation, he admits, find their abilities immediately enriched.

And then there is resistance from mainstream organizations. The National Federation of the Blind, the largest blind organization in America, does not endorse Kish's work. "Let's just say he's unique," says John Paré, the federation's executive director for strategic initiatives, clearly straining to be polite. Paré believes that for most people, echolocation is not worth the tremendous effort required to grasp it. "We urge people to learn how to use a long white cane," he says. According to Kish, a colleague once overheard members of the federation refer to him as Clicker Boy. "The blindness field is firmly based in tradition and dogma and is very slow to evolve," says Kish. "It's been traditionally dominated by sighted people who feel the need to tell blind people what to do."

The same afternoon I first visit Kish, I also meet Brian Bushway and Juan Ruiz. Bushway became blind at age 14 due to a genetic condition known as optic nerve atrophy and was introduced to Kish soon after. Ruiz was born blind and was one of Kish's first students; Kish began working with him while preparing his echolocation thesis. They both told me, individually, that Kish's teaching transformed them, allowing them to feel at peace with their blindness and at one with the world.

Bushway and Ruiz are now in their late 20s and have become instructors with World Access. They often hang out at Kish's home, forming a foul-mouthed and funny little gang. (Bushway: "You know why echolocators get all the girls? 'Cause they're skilled with their tongues and comfortable in the dark.") They've become so adept at echolocation that, in many ways, they have surpassed their teacher - at least in terms of fearlessness, sociability, and willingness to run into poles. They're the next generation of echolocators, ready to take Kish's work and see how far they can push it.

If you happen to be blind and want to live a bold, stereotype-smashing life, there will be blood. I witness this firsthand when I spend a day mountain biking with Bushway and Ruiz. (Kish, acceding to the realities of near-middle age, stays home.) We ride on a roller-coastery ridgetop trail in the Santa Ana Mountains, above the town of Mission Viejo. Clipped to the rear fork of each of our bikes is a plastic zip tie, attached so that the end flicks through our spokes, creating a constant snapping sound that lets Bushway and Ruiz know where the other bikes are. But to determine where the trail is going, and where the bushes and rocks and fence posts and trees are, the boys rely on echolocation.

Bushway is a fearless biker. He often flies down the dirt trail in aerodynamic form, hands off the brakes, clicking as fast and as loud as he can. "Your brain is on overload," he says to me during a water break. "You feel like you can hear every bush, every tree. Your body is hyperaware." I try and warn them when the trail presents a serious consequence, like a long drop-off on one side or a cactus jutting out. But mostly I'm just along for the ride. It's difficult to believe, even though it's happening right in front of me. It's incredible.

And then, suddenly, it's not. When I look behind me and see that Ruiz has drifted back, I stop and wait for him. I'm just standing there, silently, and before I realize what's happening, he is bearing down on me. I shout, and he pulls the brakes, but it's too late. He smashes into me and crushes his left hand between his handlebar and the back of my seat post. He falls off his bike and rolls about in pain, clutching his hand. There's a trickle of blood, though nothing seems broken. I feel terrible, but Ruiz says it's his fault - he should have echolocated my bike, even if I wasn't moving. We finish the ride, with Ruiz using only one hand.

The next day I join Kish and Bushway as they teach Sebastian Mancipe, who is 15 and has been working with World Access for three years. When he started, he rarely came out of his bedroom. He had little interaction with the outside world. He developed infant glaucoma and was blind by age three months. His parents moved from Colombia to the United States to give him a chance at a better life. His mother, Viviana, saw a brief appearance by Kish on the Ripley's Believe It or Not television show, and soon hired World Access to work with Sebastian.

He now rides a skateboard. He ice-skates. He's popular at school, stocked with friends and a busy social life. I follow as Kish and Bushway stroll around Sebastian's neighborhood, in a busy section of Burbank. He'd obviously mastered the echolocation basics - the pot lid, the pillow, general shapes. Kish and Bushway encourage him to push his skills further. "A tree," says Kish, clicking a couple of times, "is like a bush on a pole." They walk on. "A tree without a bush on top is probably a telephone pole." They pass a parking lot. "A large object that starts out low at one end, rises in the middle, and drops off again at the other end - that's a parked car."

Back at home, I ask Sebastian's mother about the impact World Access has had on her son. "It was an awakening," she says. "He believes he can do anything. To see Sebastian as a normal child..." She can't complete the sentence before the tears come.

The longer the waiting list for his services grows, the more conflicted Kish feels. He knows what he's doing is important. But what he really wants, as more people clamor for his time, as the frequent-flier miles add up, is to hand over the reins of World Access and run away from it all.

He's essentially a loner. "My constitution," he says, "is that of Grizzly Adams." In 2003 he purchased a 12-foot by 12-foot cabin deep in the Angeles National Forest. It was built in 1916; he paid $10,000 for it. To get there he'd take a taxi to the end of the road and hike in. "My only company," he wrote in his journal at the time, "is a small family of mice." He explored the wilderness. "I taught myself how to negotiate tricky, winding trails with sharp switchbacks, how to cross rushing streams on slippery stones. I've gone for miles and days without meeting another soul."

He was once asked by a colleague what he thought the biggest problem was with being blind. "My biggest barrier is people," he answered. "Especially sighted people." He has never once in his life had a girlfriend or, for that matter, a boyfriend. When I ask him, via e-mail, to explain why, his response is three words: "Lack of interest."

Two tragedies, nearly 20 years apart, have bookended his adult life. The first was the death of his dog, a black lab named Whiska. This was in 1990. She was run over by a car while Kish was walking with her. Kish has always blamed himself for the accident. "I loved Whiska with an intensity that completely distorted my better judgment," he wrote. "I spoiled her rotten and took over her job. She forgot to watch for traffic, because I'd always done that for her." He had nightmares for a year after the accident. "The chain's just dangling and there's no dog. I'll never forget that moment." Not long after, he got another dog, but soon started traveling and gave him away. That was his last pet.

The second tragedy occurred in January 2007 when his cabin burned down. He'd had a wood-burning stove installed, and the wrong materials were used for the chimney. The fire was fast-moving and horrific - "my last memories of my cabin are the ominous crackle and rumble of advancing flames" - and Kish had no idea if it would engulf the entire canyon, incinerating him as well. The disaster haunts him; he keeps a chunk of melted glass from the cabin in his home in Long Beach. "A piece of my own heart has gone up in flames," he wrote. He plans to one day return to the woods, perhaps permanently. "I find people," he says, "to be incredibly draining."

Kish has an idea. Beyond the pot lid and the pillow, beyond the mission of World Access, there is something he has been quietly working on for more than a decade. If his wish is fulfilled - if someone else takes over World Access and he's able to escape from life's perpetual rush hour - it may prove to be his true legacy. What Kish envisions is the next leap in human echolocation. His idea is to become more like a bat.

Bats are the best. Some can fly in complete darkness, navigating around thousands of other bats while nabbing insects one millimeter wide. Bats have evolved, over millions of years, to possess the ideal mouth shape and the perfect ear rotation for echolocation. They can perceive high-frequency sound waves, beyond the range of human hearing - waves that are densely packed together, whose echoes give precise detail.
There is evidence that humans could be that good. Bats have tiny brains. Just the auditory cortex of a human brain is many times larger than the entire brain of a bat. This means that humans can likely process more complex auditory information than bats. What we'll require, to make up for bats' evolutionary head start, is a little artificial boost.

Actually, two boosts. We need a way to create batlike sound waves, and we need to be able to hear those waves. In pursuit of these goals, Kish has spent time in New Zealand with Leslie Kay, who worked on underwater sonar for the British Navy during the Cold War. For nearly 50 years, Kay tinkered with ideas for helping the blind to see with sound. He eventually introduced, after many weeks of consultation with Kish, a product called the K-Sonar, a flashlight-size machine that attaches to a blind person's cane and emits ultrasonic pulses. The pulses are then digitally translated into tones humans can hear, through earphones. "Flowers actually sound soft," says Kish. "Stones sound hard and crisp. It pretty much represents the physical environment as music." The problem is range: The K-Sonar can detect a postage stamp from 15 feet, but not the side of a barn from 30 feet.

If money were no object, Kish believes that blind people could essentially mimic bats within five years. A next generation of K-Sonar, using the input from a global consortium of scientists that Kish has been corresponding with, should have a nearly limitless range. Our hearing, Kish says, can be increased tenfold through surgical augmentation - basically, inner-ear microphone implants. Combine the two and it's possible that the blind will be able to take up tennis. Kish figures it would require $15 million to prove whether or not his idea is feasible. He fears he'll never get the opportunity.

"It's virtually impossible to gather funding for experimental devices for the blind," he says. "The blind population is seen as a lost cause." Kish's patience is running thin. He is still reaching out to scientists and studying scholarly journals and pondering ways to conjure the money. But more and more these days, he finds himself daydreaming about rebuilding his cabin and devoting himself to playing music, to writing. Let the new crop of echolocators take over the research and the networking and the panhandling. So for the foreseeable future, at least, Kish will continue to click in his usual way. And the sighted world will continue to not notice.

This story appears in the May 2012 issue.

For access to exclusive gear videos, celebrity interviews, and more, subscribe on YouTube!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. And navigate the wilderness alone. And recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. How? The same way bats can see in the dark.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
'blade runner' makes unprecedented olympic debut - cnn

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Blade runner' makes unprecedented Olympic debut - CNN

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Oscar Pistorius, a South African double-amputee nicknamed the "Blade Runner," made an unprecedented Olympic debut Saturday

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | Flying While Blind (Published 2018)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I am not only an experienced traveler; I am an experienced blind person.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
EveryBody: An Artifact History of Disability in America

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Many stories and events related to people with disabilities never make it into the history books or shared public memories. Familiar concepts and events such as citizenship, work, and wars become more complicated, challenge our assumptions about what counts as history, and transform our connection with each other when viewed from the historical perspective of people with disabilities, America's largest minority.

Knowing these histories deepens understanding of the American experience and reveals how complicated history really is. In addition, when history comes through artifacts, distinct themes emerge-for example, the significance of place, relationships, and technology-that are less apparent when only books and words are used.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
EveryBody: An Artifact History of Disability in America

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Many stories and events related to people with disabilities never make it into the history books or shared public memories. Familiar concepts and events such as citizenship, work, and wars become more complicated, challenge our assumptions about what counts as history, and transform our connection with each other when viewed from the historical perspective of people with disabilities, America's largest minority.

# data[].attributes.headline
Ms. Baker's dad told her that students should read about this incredible blind opera singer. :) 

# data[].attributes.subject
Ms. Baker's dad told her that students should read about this incredible blind opera singer. :) 

# data[].attributes.body
You can research and find more articles about him.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
He is the golden-voiced Italian tenor who overcame blindness and other extreme obstacles to find success on the world stage, selling more than 80 million albums. Now Andrea Bocelli, 58, has inspired one of Britain's leading film directors to tell his extraordinary story on the big screen. The singer has asked only that his blindness not be portrayed as a disability.

The Music of Silence is being shot by Michael Radford, whose previous films include the critically acclaimed Il Postino - for which he received an Oscar nomination - and a version of The Merchant of Venice starring Al Pacino.

This new film, based on Bocelli's autobiographical novel of the same name, explores the relationship between blindness and hearing, as well as other senses heightened by the loss of sight. Bocelli went blind as a child, struggled to teach himself to read music in Braille, and competed in talent shows until his potential was recognised by Luciano Pavarotti, who declared that "there is no finer voice than Bocelli".

Having made ends meet as a bar singer, Bocelli went on to perform to sold-out audiences all over the world, sang to presidents and popes, and was awarded a star on the Hollywood walk of fame.

He is portrayed in the film by Toby Sebastian, the British actor known for Game of Thrones, who speaks with an Italian accent and mimes to tracks of Bocelli's voice that are synchronised in a complex technical process.

Radford told the Observer that Bocelli asked that Sebastian did not attempt to portray a blind person "because I spend most of my life trying to pretend that I can actually see". He said that Bocelli tries to avoid embarrassing people, believing that "nobody wants to see me reaching for a chair like a desperate man with my arms stretched out and feeling about".

The director was initially wary of making a film about a living person, but he said he found Bocelli's story so inspirational. "He was born with glaucoma in one eye. He was in hospital most of his early childhood until they managed to save about 10% of the sight in one eye. He was categorised as blind, but with a limited amount of sight," he said. "Then, when he was 12, he was playing football in his blind school and somebody kicked a ball that hit his other eye and blinded him."

In working on the script with Bocelli, Radford got to know him and began to understand exactly why the singer "doesn't consider himself to be handicapped in any way". Radford explained: "This is about a guy who's determined - he's a forceful character. He's also physically extremely courageous. He rides horses and does all sorts of things that you wouldn't imagine that someone who is blind would do with the degree of skill that he achieves.

"You see him walking round the place. Last time I went to see him, he greeted me on an Andalucían stallion which was walking only on its hind legs and he was controlling it. Amazing. Then he galloped into the distance."

He added: "There are all these tricks that he uses. He'll kick a chair with his foot, to figure out where it is. And of course his other senses are absolutely developed. He can smell, touch, feel, above all he can hear. Literally by clicking his fingers he can tell you how far away a wall is."

Bocelli has just released a special 20th anniversary edition of his hit album, Romanza, which includes two new versions of the song that catapulted him to stardom, Time To Say Goodbye ( Con Te Partirò), one of the biggest-selling singles of all time. It has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide. Now he has made new recordings to be used in The Music of Silence.

He also has a cameo role in the film. Radford said: "The scene kicks off with him sitting at a typewriter, writing the story of the film, and he's in the theatre ... at the end, he goes through the theatre ... and then steps out in front of a huge audience and starts to sing."

The film takes the story up to the point where Bocelli was "desperate for some sort of success", Radford added. An international cast includes Antonio Banderas, whose films include Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Desperado, who plays the Maestro. The script is a collaboration with both Bocelli and Anna Pavignano, Radford's collaborator on Il Postino.

The film is being made in English. "This was something I was very wary of to begin with, because my area of activity is authenticity," said Radford. "But I succumbed to that pressure.

"We have Italian actors speaking English with an Italian accent. That seems to work, strangely. Toby [Sebastian] speaks English with an Italian accent. We have dialogue and dialect coaches. We have absolutely everybody coaching everybody. It's very complicated. We have music experts, blind experts, every type of expert. It's quite extraordinary."

Radford spoke to the Observer on the set at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, where the shoot continues throughout this month. He said that while Bocelli might not be able to see the final movie, he can certainly "feel it, sense it and hear it".
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Andrea Bocelli's battle with blindness inspires big-screen story

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
He is the golden-voiced Italian tenor who overcame blindness and other extreme obstacles to find success on the world stage, selling more than 80 million albums. Now Andrea Bocelli, 58, has inspired one of Britain's leading film directors to tell his extraordinary story on the big screen.

# data[].attributes.headline
About a blind trumpet player in a marching band

# data[].attributes.subject
About a blind trumpet player in a marching band

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
She lost her sight when she was 12. Now she's a blind trumpeter in the biggest marching band in the U.S.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
More than 800 kids crowded the field when the Allen Escadrille, the biggest high school marching band in the U.S., performs. But it used to be that there was always one student left out.

# data[].attributes.headline
Another article about Eric W, a mountain climber who is blind

# data[].attributes.subject
Another article about Eric W, a mountain climber who is blind

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Image

When Erik Weihenmayer finished his first climb, he thought, "This is what I want out of my life." Credit... Skyler Williams

Reaching the summit of Mount Everest is a triumph for any climber, but for Erik Weihenmayer, the accomplishment is even more impressive. That's because he is blind. Born with a rare eye disease, Mr. Weihenmayer lost his sight at age 13 and later discovered a sense of freedom through climbing. Over the years, the 50-year-old has reached the highest peaks on seven continents and also kayaked the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.

A former schoolteacher, Mr. Weihenmayer co-founded No Barriers, a nonprofit organization that teaches outdoor skills to those with physical challenges. Earlier this month, No Barriers staged its annual summit in New York, with many of the workshops taking place on the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum.

The following are edited excerpts from a conversation with Mr. Weihenmayer.
How did you develop an interest in climbing?
Growing up in Connecticut, my Dad would drive me three hours to Massachusetts once a month to this adventure program for the blind. They took us to New Hampshire and we rock climbed on these beautiful granite rock faces. It was very tactile. That's what I really loved about it. You can feel all these little knobs and cracks and fissures and little dishes in the rock. So you're problem-solving with your hands and feet as your eyes. You had to put your body in all these cool, acrobatic positions to get yourself from point A to point B and you're trying to solve this puzzle that's embedded in the rock. I loved the great adventure and mystery and full engagement. I got to the top and I could hear the valley below me. I could hear the wind blowing through the trees. And I thought this is so stunning. This is what I want out of my life.
How you navigate without sight?
I've been really fortunate to attract really awesome friends and mentors. On a big mountain, they're hiking in front of me and a lot of times I can hear their crampons crunching in the snow, so I can just follow them. When we're on a rock, they're jingling a bear bell and I'm using two trekking poles to feel my way. And then when I get in more technical terrain, I'm just feeling my way up the rock face or an ice face. So I'm just doing it by sound and by touch.
What are the challenges and rewards of travel?
I love to not know exactly what's around the corner. It's all new. From travel and adventure, there's some struggle. I've come home from trips just feeling broken from carrying huge packs. On Everest, the Sherpas are superstitious. They're Buddhists and they feel like there's karma. If you're blind, you've made your own luck. If you climb a mountain, you'll bring devastation down on people and it'll be bad luck for them. We were having a little trouble finding Sherpas to support us and one guy, Ang Pasang, said, "I think you make your own luck." I remember on the top of the south summit, I thought, he's broken this idea of karma to connect his fate to mine. How courageous. I do think that when you go into these unknown experiences with an open heart you come away with great gifts that affect the trajectory of your life and enable you to have insight into human beings - what we can do and how much we can aspire to do.
What are your favorite places?
Nepal is so diverse and I really like the people. I also love Peru. It's got really huge adventure, great mountains, amazing Inca culture, and it's not that far away.
Why did you bring No Barriers to New York?
We've always used the outdoors as our setting for this journey of transformation that we bring people on. I think No Barriers is a message we all need right now. There's just so much anxiety in the world and one of the best messages of No Barriers is to turn inside and really grow what we have and lean in and get strong.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Conquering Mt. Everest, Against All Odds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Reaching the summit of Mount Everest is a triumph for any climber, but for Erik Weihenmayer, the accomplishment is even more impressive. That's because he is blind. Born with a rare eye disease, Mr. Weihenmayer lost his sight at age 13 and later discovered a sense of freedom through climbing.

# data[].attributes.body
If you're interested, here is more on this topic: https://www.ted.com/talks/hugh_herr_how_we_ll_become_cyborgs_and_extend_human_potential?language=en

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
New bionics let us run, climb and dance | Hugh Herr | TED

# data[].attributes.headline
Language Choices relating to People with Disabilities

# data[].attributes.subject
Language Choices relating to People with Disabilities

# data[].attributes.body
For further inquiry, research "People First Language."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By Beth Haller, NCDJ board member
Journalism faculty, Towson University

Most trained North American journalists try to follow style guides, but when covering the disability community, conflicting terminology sometimes exists.

It is called identity-first versus people-first language.

People-first language, terms such as people with disabilities or woman with cerebral palsy, is the terminology many in North America have heard of. It represents the shift away for outdated terms like "handicapped" or the offensive "retarded." These older terms were part of disability organization and government agency names. For example, in 1975, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act was passed by Congress to mandate the inclusion of disabled children in public schools. It was renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 1990, which is the same year the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed. The ADA provides broad civil rights to the disability community and mechanisms to fight discrimination against people with disabilities.

As prominent disability rights legislation that is still in place, the ADA helped promote the change to people-first language. It was a shift in terminology that came from the government and many North American disability organizations.

Although many individuals with disabilities do favor people-first language, a growing number of disabled people, especially from the Deaf community and the autistic community, prefer identity-first language, such as autistic woman.

Syracuse University's Disability Cultural Center says, "The basic reason behind members of these groups' dislike for the application of people-first language to themselves is that they consider their disabilities to be inseparable parts of who they are." They embrace the terms autistic or Deaf or blind or disabled as their identity. (Geography is also part of this debate. In Great Britain, the preferred terminology has always been identity-first, i.e. disabled person. In fact, many in the British Disability Studies academic world and disability activists there say the term people with disabilities doesn't fit with the social model idea that society's barriers and negative attitudes are what actually disable people.)

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) in Washington, D.C., explains clearly that most autistic advocates affiliated with ASAN prefer identity-first terminology. Autistic blogger, activist, and law student Lydia Brown said in a 2011 blog post reposted on the ASAN website as a language guide: "In the autism community, many self-advocates and their allies prefer terminology such as 'Autistic,' 'Autistic person,' or 'Autistic individual' because we understand autism as an inherent part of an individual's identity - the same way one refers to 'Muslims,' 'African-Americans,' 'Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender/Queer,' 'Chinese,' 'gifted,' 'athletic,' or 'Jewish.'"

Brown explains the identity component of the terminology: "When we say 'Autistic person,' we recognize, affirm, and validate an individual's identity as an Autistic person. We recognize the value and worth of that individual as an Autistic person - that being Autistic is not a condition absolutely irreconcilable with regarding people as inherently valuable and worth something. We affirm the individual's potential to grow and mature, to overcome challenges and disability, and to live a meaningful life as an Autistic. Ultimately, we are accepting that the individual is different from non-Autistic people-and that that's not a tragedy, and we are showing that we are not afraid or ashamed to recognize that difference."

Journalists should not disregard this debate over disability terminology as unimportant. In fact, the reason for this article was a lengthy discussion that broke out on the Teaching Disability Studies Facebook page in 2015 with most posts criticizing NCDJ's promotion of people-first language in its online style guide.

The Associated Press Style Guide that so many American journalists use does not discuss people-first language, so journalists should look to their sources from the disability community to ask about the preferred terms. This is especially important if interviewing a self-advocate from a specific community, like the Deaf community or the autistic community. But many people with other disabilities are also shifting to identity-first terms.

In August 2015, The Mighty, an online publication focused on disability and illness, asked people with a variety of disabilities and their loved ones to discuss which terms they preferred on its Facebook page, and more than 150 people weighed in on the topic.

A woman with cerebral palsy said: "I have cerebral palsy, and I prefer identity-first language. I consider my disability to be an inextricable part of my identity as a human being. It isn't negative to say I'm disabled; it's a statement of fact. [My disability] is a huge part of my identity and how I experience the world. To me, person-first language implies a degree of shame or negativity about disability. I embrace my disability because it influences so much of how I see and experience the world."

"Person first. I may be bipolar, but I would rather people judge me for me, not my illness." Nicole Mcgarry said in The Mighty article.

Taylor Smith posted: "Identity first. Disability is a part of who I am. It's helped me grow as a person and brings me together with a community. Also, it's not my health that disables me - it is society's unwillingness to accommodate us."

When journalists' sources are disability organizations, they are likely to be asked to use people-first language in their stories. Organizations like the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD), the National Council on Independent Living and The Arc, for example, all use people-first language on their websites. The Arc's page about language says, "People-First Language is an objective way of acknowledging, communicating, and reporting on disabilities. It eliminates generalizations and stereotypes, by focusing on the person rather than the disability."

The one thing that both sides of the terminology discussion agree on is that language about disability is important, so journalists must clearly understand language preferences when reporting on disability issues.

As Lydia Brown reiterates, "The way we use language affects those around us - in our immediate communities and in society at large. Trends of language have the power to transform ideas and attitudes. To dismiss this as 'a silly semantics argument' denies the power of language."
Discussions about disability terminology:
American Association of People with Disabilities. (2008) Disability etiquette. http://www.aapd.com/assets/files/dmd-coordinator-resources/disabilityetiquette.pdf

The Arc. (2015). What is people-first language? The Arc media center. http://www.thearc.org/who-we-are/media-center/people-first-language

Autistic Self Advocacy Network. (2011). Identity-first language. http://autisticadvocacy.org/home/about-asan/identity-first-language/

Brown, L. (2011, August 4). The significance of semantics: Person-first language: Why it matters. Autistic Hoya blog. http://autistichoya.blogspot.com/2011/08/significance-of-semantics-person-first.html

Brown, L. (2012). Ableist words and terms to avoid. Autistic Hoya Blog http://autistichoya.blogspot.com/p/ableist-words-and-terms-to-avoid.html

Brown, L. (2012). Autism FAQ. Autistic Hoya Blog http://autistichoya.blogspot.com/p/introduction-to-autism-faqs-of-autism.html

Diary of a goldfish blog. (2008, April 15). The language of disability. http://blobolobolob.blogspot.com/2008/04/language-of-disability.html

Endow, J. (2015, Jan. 8). Person first attitude trumps language. Aspects of autism translated. http://www.judyendow.com/advocacy/person-first-attitude-trumps-language/

Kids as Self-Advocates (n.d.) Respectful disability language. Albuquerque, NM. http://www.fvkasa.org/resources/files/history-nyln-language.php

International Labour Organization. (2015). Reporting on disability. Guidelines for media. http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/-ed_emp/-ifp_skills/documents/publication/wcms_127002.pdf

Kassenbrock, R. (2015, August 11). Should you use person-first or identity-first language? The Mighty. http://themighty.com/2015/08/should-you-use-person-first-or-identity-first-language2/

Liebowitz, C. (2015, March 20). I am disabled: On identity-first versus people-first language. The body is not an apology blog. http://thebodyisnotanapology.com/magazine/i-am-disabled-on-identity-first-versus-people-first-language/

The Mighty Facebook page (2015, August 4).Do you prefer people to use person-first or identity-first language when referring to you or a loved one with special needs? Your response may be included in an article on The Mighty! https://www.facebook.com/Themightysite/posts/511961265618292?comment_id=511988925615526&offset=50&total_comments=148&comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R9%22%7D

National Center on Disability & Journalism. (2015). Style guide. http://ncdj.org/style-guide/

National Council on Independent Living. (2015). Website. http://www.ncil.org/

Oliver, M. (1990, July 23). The individual and social models of disability. http://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/files/library/Oliver-in-soc-dis.pdf

Perry, D. M. (2015, Dec. 7). Universal design for writing about humans. How did we get into this mess blog. http://www.thismess.net/2015/12/universal-design-for-writing-about.html

Research and Training Center for Independent Living. (2013). Guidelines: How to write and report about people with disabilities. http://rtcil.org/products/media

Sinclair, J. (1999). Why I dislike "person first" language. Autism Mythbusters. http://autismmythbusters.com/general-public/autistic-vs-people-with-autism/jim-sinclair-why-i-dislike-person-first-language/

Special Olympics (n.d.) Special Olympics disability language guidelines. Washington, DC.

http://www.specialolympics.org/uploadedFiles/Fact%20Sheet_Terminology%20Guide(1).pdf

Snow, K. (2009-13). Let's put the person first, not the disability. Disability is natural blog. http://www.disabilityisnatural.com/explore/people-first-language

Syracuse University Disability Cultural Center. (2012). An introductory guide to disability language and empowerment. http://sudcc.syr.edu/LanguageGuide/index.html

United States Agency for International Development (USAID). (2007). Language and disability. http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNADN699.pdf

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Journalists should learn to carefully traverse a variety of disability terminology

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Beth Haller, NCDJ board member Journalism faculty, Towson University Most trained North American journalists try to follow style guides, but when covering the disability community, conflicting terminology sometimes exists. It is called identity-first versus people-first language. People-first language, terms such as people with disabilities or woman with cerebral palsy, is the terminology many in North America have heard of.

# data[].attributes.body
You can also Google and find Holly singing the National Anthem at the Blues game last Saturday.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Holly Lynn Connor Changes Viewpoints

It's takes a village to raise a child.
It takes a child with autism to raise the consciousness of the village.

~Elaine Hall

Holly Lynn Connor, the young lady you are about to meet today, is mesmerizing. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about check out this YouTube video of her singing. While I've been following Holly on Instagram for some time, it was only recently that I learned her story. I knew she was blind, I knew she had autism, and I also knew she was extremely talented. What I didn't know was her backstory and how she came to be who she is today. Today, Holly's Mom, Katie, invites Bold Blind Beauty readers into her beautiful daughter's life. Enjoy! ~Stephanae

The Diagnosis

On November 22, 2004, Holly Lynn Connor was born in Seattle, Washington with no complications. From day one, we noticed Holly never seemed to look at us and cried nonstop. We were assured by the pediatrician that her eyes were simply developing at a slower rate and not to worry. By four months Holly showed no improvement and was diagnosed with Septo Optic Dysplasia ("SOD") and Panhypopituitarism ("Hypopit").

A person with SOD has optic nerves that are small and poorly developed. Instead of having over 1 million nerve fibers from each eye to the brain, there are far fewer connections. Holly is rare in that she was affected in both eyes and could see little to nothing at birth. When Holly was diagnosed, there were minimal online resources and support groups. I felt alone in the world with no answers. To date, there are still no explanations as to what causes SOD.

Besides being blind, at an early age Holly displayed signs of autism (obsessive-compulsive behaviors, single words language, etc.). The combination of being blind and autistic really made for a difficult time, particularly the first 4 years. Until she was three-years-old, she:

wouldn't walk outside,

eat solid foods,

go anywhere with fluorescent lighting,

sleep through the night,

wear shoes or any clothing below the knees or elbows.

And she cried pretty much nonstop.

Improvements Achieved Through Treatments

When she was four-years-old, we took her to China for seven weeks to receive stem cell treatments. The effect was miraculous. While the treatment was geared towards her vision, we saw a nearly 50% improvement in her autism almost immediately. Roughly two years later, her vision improvements also became apparent. Her vision increased from an inch or two to seeing contrast and movement up to 10 feet away.

Due to Holly's successful treatment in China, we booked another round of stem cell treatment when she was twelve. This time it was to Panama. The trip to Panama was slightly more abbreviated at only 7 days. Since that visit, she has seen additional autism reductions. In addition, her vision, while still being blind, picks up contrast and movement up to 30 feet.

Two clear-cut examples of autism reduction are the reduction in Holly's anxiety levels and the willingness to expand her diet. Pre-Panama her anxiety levels were nearly debilitating at times. As is common with most kids with autism, Holly would only eat about 5 things prior to Panama. Though she always objects at least once to a new food, now she eats nearly everything we give her.

Holly's Musical Prowess

What makes Holly so unique and special is her musical talent, something we discovered at a very young age. When she was only a month old we played a Winnie The Pooh tape and she immediately stopped crying. After that, our house was filled with music 24 hours a day. It seemed to be the only thing that calmed her.

When Holly was 6 months old, she began playing the piano keys with her hands and her feet.

At age 1, she could count to 100, sing the alphabet backwards, and play simple notes on the piano. It was at this point where we realized she has instant memory.

By Age 2, Holly could play any song by ear on the piano.

At 3, we discovered she had perfect pitch, vibrato, and she could tell identify keys of songs on the radio.

When she was 4 we started piano lessons with a teacher specifically trained for kids with Autism.

By age 7, she could recognize and play complex chords on the piano. Holly also memorized and played songs on the piano after hearing them just once.

When she was 8, Holly picked up the harmonica and recorder. This was also around the time she started being ok in public. So we attended live theater and kids' performances every weekend.

A Naturally Born Performer

Holly joined her first choir at her elementary school when she was 9 years old. She also began working with a vocal coach and attended her first vocal/piano classes. The facility worked specifically with kids with disabilities and paired them with typical kids. This year marked her first performance at a summer camp in which they highlighted her singing. The seed was planted for enrolling Holly in musical theater.

When Holly was 10, she had her first piano recital and first vocal competition. She sang opera and musical theater pieces and took 1st place for her age group. Shortly after, we moved to St. Louis for my husband's job.

Holly started playing the cello in the school's 5th-grade orchestra program and joined her first formal choir ( STL Children's Choirs). She also was in her first musical, Space Pirates. Being a new endeavor for everyone involved, she did her scenes sitting in a chair..

The following year, age 11, Holly started taking voice and musical theater classes. She was also cast in her second ever show, Seussical. This time she was doing limited choreography and even had a speaking line.

At age 12, Holly was cast in 8 consecutive shows with 3 named roles. The roles included Glinda in Wizard of Oz, Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, and Mama Ogre in Shrek. We also started her in ballet lessons.

Theatrical Performance

Holly Singing Solo

Singing, Dancing & Acting

By the time Holly turned 13, it was an even busier year. She:

was cast in 10 consecutive shows with 4 named roles:

including Queen Victoria in a Little Princess,

Mrs. Darling in Peter Pan,

Bird Woman in Mary Poppins,

and Cinderella's Mother in Into the Woods.

started taking tap lessons,

joined the school jazz band playing piano,

joined another choir, and

wrote her first original song.

That brings us to the present. At age 14, Holly is immersed in the arts 7 days a week when not in school. She is in 3 choirs, 2 jazz bands, acting and dance classes, private lessons for acting, ballet, tap, and piano.

Holly works out every morning on her spin bike. In addition, she also trains weekly with a personal trainer to help with low muscle tone. She is part of a tandem biking club half the year. At any given time she is in 2-3 musical theatre productions. Right now, she's excited to be playing Medda Larkin in Newsies and Madame Aubert in Titanic.

Holly Continues Blossoming

The last few years of Holly's development have been life-changing for Holly and for those around her. St. Louis musical theater community has been extremely accepting and inclusive. The directors have all been accommodating and understanding of both her visual and autistic needs. More than that though, the kids she performs with are more accepting than I could have ever imagined. They are always looking out for her and we never worry about her being in a safe space.

Now that she is fully immersed in the arts community in St. Louis and working with such a large number of kids, Holly seems to have friends everywhere she goes. For the first time ever, Holly found a best friend who's become a huge part of her life. They talk every day, eat lunch together at school, and are in choirs and musicals together regularly. Her friend, Abby, has an effect on Holly which is hard to quantify. Through her friendship with Abby, Holly is learning more of what it means to be a typical teenager. She's learning how to interact with others on a social level, and how to have empathy. Empathy is very difficult for someone with autism.

Holly With Friends

Abby & Holly

Being The Change

On January 1 st, 2019 I began an Instagram awareness project, @365withhollyconnor, where I post Holly answering a daily question. Using the book, "Q&A a Day for Kids" by Betsy Franco, followers can learn about Holly's life. They can also learn how she navigates the world being both blind and autistic.)

Recently, a girl from the local high school approached me. She told me that her twin brother has autism and Holly changed his life. Peers began befriending him as a direct result of Holly's involvement at school and her social media presence. Holly is showing it's okay to:

talk to someone who is blind and autistic

be friends with someone who is blind and autistic

be unique and different

Holly isextraordinarily talented andwe continuously keep her engaged with the world around her. Remaining involved in musical endeavors will position her for a greater opportunityfor future success in life. Through the many ways she interacts with the world, Holly continues to influence and change how people see her. Hopefully, this will translate into how they see, interact with, and accept people with all abilities.

Holly Lynn Connor Changes Viewpoints Featured Image Description:

In the featured photo Holly is outside under a white event tent playing a baby grand piano. She is wearing a light print dress and her long hair is draped down her back. Her white cane is propped up in front of the piano.

Additional Image Descriptions:

1. Professional headshot of Holly with long wavy red hair framing her pretty face. She is wearing an emerald green top.

2. Black & white photo of Holly as a toddler sitting on a piano bench with her hands and feet on the piano keys.

3. In this photo, little Holly is standing in front of the piano with her arms reaching up to play the keys. She is wearing a tan jumper paired with a white polo shirt and red (with white trim) Mary Jane shoes. Her blond hair is in pigtails.

4. A photo grid with two photos. The first one is of a theatrical performance with Holly and a number of her peers in costume on stage. Holly and two characters on either side of her are wearing southern belle type gowns. In the second photo, Holly is singing solo holding a microphone. Outdoor photo of Holly casually dressed in a black jacket, jeans, and a white graphic tee. Her hair is pulled back and she has bangs and is also wearing sunglasses.

5. This photo grid also contains two photos. In the first one, Holly and four friends are standing while posing for the camera. All five girls dressed for dance practice with black leotards and loose tops. Holly is in the center. The second photo is Holly with her best friend Abby. They are sitting on a pile of gym mats and Abby has her left arm around Holly's shoulder.

Connecting With Holly:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Holly Lynn Connor Changes Viewpoints It's takes a village to raise a child.It takes a child with autism to raise the consciousness of the village. ~Elaine Hall Holly Lynn Connor, the young lady you are about to meet today, is mesmerizing. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about check out this YouTube...

# data[].attributes.body
You might see if you can find other spoken word poets with disabilities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Every time I step outside - Disability Spoken Word [CC]

# data[].attributes.headline
Eight TED Talks about People with Disabilities

# data[].attributes.subject
Eight TED Talks about People with Disabilities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
8 Most Powerful TED Talks on Disability - 101 Mobility

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Have you ever watched a TED Talk? Since its creation in 1984, TED (which stands for "technology, entertainment, and design") has grown from a yearly event to a viral video...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Disability

Credit... Dadu Shin

Like any middle schooler, I usually start my day with cereal. Every morning, after brushing my teeth, I have a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch with milk, and try to catch all the flakes with my spoon before they go soggy. I get dressed for the day, and try to put on some makeup before my mom yells at me for hogging the bathroom. Then I go catch the bus.

While in most other ways I'm just your typical eighth grader, I also happen to have been born with Charcot-Marie-Tooth, a form of muscular dystrophy. Charcot-Marie-Tooth is a degenerative nerve disease that causes muscles in my arms and legs to atrophy over time. I wear leg braces and use a wheelchair to get around, and have an aide at school who helps me spin my locker combination. Every morning, an accessible bus arrives at my house to pick me up. Actually, it's more of a van, with a "School Bus" sign on top.

For the most part, despite my wheelchair and knowledge of medical terminology (you build that kind of vocabulary when it's about your own limbs), my daily reality is mostly the same as that of my classmates. I groan over the same math and science homework, giggle with the same friends, and like every other adolescent, I probably spend too much time on my phone. As a girl with a disability, I know that my story is not a sad one.

For the past four years, I've been trying to convince everyone else as well that my story doesn't have to be a sad one. In 2013, I started a Change.org petition asking American Girl, my favorite doll company, to make a doll with a disability. As a longtime fan of the company, whose dolls are accompanied by books and movies with positive stories of girls overcoming challenges, I wanted to see a story with a heroine who was in a wheelchair like me. The petition got 140,000 signatures, and got a lot of news coverage. People clearly wanted to see kids with disabilities featured in an upbeat ways.

It would not be fair to say that American Girl completely ignores disability. They do make accessories for dolls like a wheelchair, crutches, a hearing aid and a diabetes care kit. In one of the stories there is a secondary character in a wheelchair; in another, a boy in the hospital with polio, and the 2017 Girl of the Year has a stutter. But these were not the characters I wanted to see.

I was inspired to take matters into my own hands and write a book of my own, starring a girl with a disability. I knew exactly what genre of book I wanted to write. I've never been a fan of "great children's literature" that was somber or tragic. My friends and I have loved the Cupcake Diaries series, paperbacks with pink covers that described four best friends and their adventures together, making cupcakes. Not exactly heavy stuff, but fun to read. I wanted to write something like the Cupcake Diaries, but starring a middle-school girl with a disability and her filmmaking adventures with her best friends. Instead of making cupcakes, they would make special-effect YouTube videos.

My older sister Eva helped me set up a Kickstarter campaign to hire an editor. We wrote the first draft of the book, called "Mia Lee Is Wheeling Through Middle School," and found a literary agent. Using our money from our Kickstarter campaign, we hired someone to help us edit our draft into a polished copy, then sent it out to publishing houses.

When the responses started to come in, they were almost all the same: for a girl who was in a wheelchair with a degenerative nerve disease, Mia Lee was just too happy.

"I keep expecting more from the plotline than what's currently here," one publisher wrote. "What if it was about sisters who were twins, and one had Charcot-Marie-Tooth and one didn't? That would create a more important conflict." Another said that Mia Lee's character didn't seem suited for a lighthearted story. Finally, my agent told me, "I just don't think people are ready for this type of story for this type of character."

What she meant is that Mia Lee, my sassy, YouTube-loving heroine, differed too much from the convention of what a disabled kid is supposed to be like. There are very few stories about kids in wheelchairs, and there are even fewer with a disabled person who is cheerful and happy. Disability is always seen as a misfortune, and disabled characters are simply opportunities to demonstrate the kindness of the able-bodied protagonists.

For once, I want to see the disabled kids not in the hospital, but in the school cafeteria eating lunch with their friends. I wanted young readers to think of disabled kids not as miserable people to be pitied, but as people living normal lives in spite of their challenges. I want young readers to see disabled kids as friends, people to gossip with, to take selfies with and to go see movies with on the weekends. Not having books that show disability in a lighthearted way makes it harder for everyone else to see disability as a normal part of life.

Although I wasn't able to find a publisher who believed in that kind of story, I used the funds from my Kickstarter to self-publish the book on Amazon. " Mia Lee Is Wheeling Through Middle School" was released last August at the National Youth Transitions Center, and has sold hundreds of copies to parents and kids around the country.

Since its publication, I've gone back to being your average middle schooler. Last month, I was in my school play, and now I am getting ready to graduate. On the weekends, I go to the library, where sometimes, I see my book on the "just returned" shelf. I often wonder who had it checked out. Maybe it was someone who would go on to invite the special needs kid in his class over for a play date. Or maybe, it was another kid with a disability, who could point to the pages and say: "She's just like me! And she's happy, too!"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Opinion | Stories About Disability Don't Have to Be Sad (Published 2017)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Disability Like any middle schooler, I usually start my day with cereal. Every morning, after brushing my teeth, I have a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch with milk, and try to catch all the flakes with my spoon before they go soggy.

# data[].attributes.body
And here is a link to a short video about him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGZPTtmydkE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
'all of us in a way are climbing blind' - cnn

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Erik Weihenmayer is redefining what it means to be blind. He's breaking down barriers in his own life and helping others do the same.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sue Austin: Deep sea diving ... in a wheelchair

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When Sue Austin got a power wheelchair, she felt a tremendous sense of freedom -- yet others looked at her as though she had lost something. In her art, she conveys the spirit of wonder she feels wheeling through the world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Psychology researchers aren't necessarily Thanksgiving experts-they may not know how to make fluffy stuffing, say, or beat the traffic to your in-laws' house-but they have become a fount of wisdom on thanksgiving (with a small "t").

Over the past decade, they've not only identified the great social, psychological, and physical health benefits that come from giving thanks; they've zeroed in on some concrete practices that help us reap those benefits.

And perhaps the most popular practice is to keep a "gratitude journal." As we've reported many times over the years, studies have traced a range of impressive benefits to the simple act of writing down the things for which we're grateful-benefits including better sleep, fewer symptoms of illness, and more happiness among adults and kids alike. We've even launched our own digital gratitude journal, Thnx4.org, here on Greater Good.

The basic practice is straightforward. In many of the studies, people are simply instructed to record five things they experienced in the past week for which they're grateful. The entries are supposed to be brief-just a single sentence-and they range from the mundane ("waking up this morning") to the sublime ("the generosity of friends") to the timeless ("the Rolling Stones").

© esolla

But when you dig into the research, you find that gratitude journals don't always work-some studies show incredible benefits, others not so much.

To understand why, I took a closer look at the research and consulted with Robert Emmons, arguably the world's leading expert on the science of gratitude and an author of some of the seminal studies of gratitude journals.

Emmons, a professor at the University of California, Davis, shared these research-based tips for reaping the greatest psychological rewards from your gratitude journal.

Don't just go through the motions. Research by psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky and others suggests that journaling is more effective if you first make the conscious decision to become happier and more grateful. "Motivation to become happier plays a role in the efficacy of journaling," says Emmons.

Go for depth over breadth. Elaborating in detail about a particular thing for which you're grateful carries more benefits than a superficial list of many things.

Get personal. Focusing on people to whom you are grateful has more of an impact than focusing on things for which you are grateful.

Try subtraction, not just addition. One effective way of stimulating gratitude is to reflect on what your life would be like without certain blessings, rather than just tallying up all those good things.

Savor surprises. Try to record events that were unexpected or surprising, as these tend to elicit stronger levels of gratitude.

Don't overdo it. Writing occasionally (once or twice per week) is more beneficial than daily journaling. In fact, one study by Lyubomirsky and her colleagues found that people who wrote in their gratitude journals once a week for six weeks reported boosts in happiness afterward; people who wrote three times per week didn't. "We adapt to positive events quickly, especially if we constantly focus on them," says Emmons. "It seems counterintuitive, but it is how the mind works."

In looking over this list, what strikes me is how keeping a gratitude journal-or perhaps the entire experience of gratitude-is really about forcing ourselves to pay attention to the good things in life we'd otherwise take for granted. Perhaps that's why the benefits seem to diminish when you start writing more than once per week, and why surprises induce stronger feelings of gratitude: It's easy to get numb to the regular sources of goodness in our lives.

Indeed, Emmons told me that when people start keeping a gratitude journal, he recommends that they see each item they list in their journal as a gift-in fact, he suggests that they "make the conscious effort to associate it with the word 'gift.'" Here are the exact instructions he gives participants in his studies:

Be aware of your feelings and how you "relish" and "savor" this gift in your imagination. Take the time to be especially aware of the depth of your gratitude.

"In other words," he says, "we tell them not to hurry through this exercise as if it were just another item on your to-do list. This way, gratitude journaling is really different from merely listing a bunch of pleasant things in one's life."

So why might this particular practice do such good for our minds and bodies? Emmons points to research showing that translating thoughts into concrete language-whether oral or written-has advantages over just thinking the thoughts: It makes us more aware of them, deepening their emotional impact.

"Writing helps to organize thoughts, facilitate integration, and helps you accept your own experiences and put them in context," he says. "In essence, it allows you to see the meaning of events going on around you and create meaning in your own life."

It has become common for therapists to recommend writing about unpleasant, even traumatic events (a practice we'll discuss in the teleseminar I'll be participating in this Friday, hosted by the National Association of Memoir Writers). Similarly, says Emmons, gratitude journals may help us "bring a new and redemptive frame of reference to a difficult life situation."

Though he does have suggestions for how to keep a gratitude journal, Emmons also stresses that "there is no one right way to do it." There's no evidence that journaling at the start of the day is any more effective than journaling before you go to bed, for instance. And aesthetics really don't matter.

"You don't need to buy a fancy personal journal to record your entries in, or worry about spelling or grammar," says Emmons. "The important thing is to establish the habit of paying attention to gratitude-inspiring events."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Psychology researchers aren't necessarily Thanksgiving experts-they may not know how to make fluffy stuffing, say, or beat the traffic to your in-laws' house-but they have become a fount of wisdom on thanksgiving (with a small "t").

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
An Experiment in Gratitude | The Science of Happiness

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Discover the Three Keys of Gratitude to Unlock Your Happiest Life!: Jane Ransom at TEDxChennai

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The power of appreciation: Mike Robbins at TEDxBellevue

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
365 Days of Thank You: Brian Doyle at TEDxYouth@SanDiego 2013