95 Fun Facts About Disability

Which US president signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law?

George H. W. Bush. As he lifted his pen on the White House lawn he said, "Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down."

What did disability rights protesters in Washington do in March 1990 to demand passage of the ADA?

Crawled up the Capitol steps. Protesters left wheelchairs and crutches at the bottom, and the youngest of them, eight-year-old Jennifer Keelan, pulled herself up alongside the adults.

The Paralympics grew out of a 1948 sports competition for British war veterans held at which hospital?

Stoke Mandeville. Injured servicemen and women competed in archery there on the day the London Olympics opened, and Dutch veterans joined in 1952 to make the contest international.

Which German-Jewish neurologist founded the games that became the Paralympics?

Ludwig Guttmann. Dismissed from his post under the Nazis' ban on Jewish doctors, he emigrated to England, where sport became part of his treatment for paralysed patients.

Which city hosted the 1960 Games now recognized as the first Paralympics?

Rome. About 400 athletes from 23 countries competed there, but sharing the Olympic host city only became the standing arrangement from Seoul in 1988.

The Paralympic movement says the "para" in its name comes from a Greek word meaning what?

Beside. The movement reads its name as the Games held beside the Olympics, though the word is usually traced to an earlier blend of "paraplegic" and "Olympics", from when only athletes with spinal injuries took part.

How was the young Louis Braille blinded?

An accident with an awl in his father's workshop. Aged three, he was trying to punch a hole in leather as his harness-maker father did when the tool slipped, and infection then spread to both eyes.

Which word, spelled into her palm by Anne Sullivan, gave Helen Keller her famous breakthrough?

Water. Keller had lost her sight and hearing at 19 months; years later she made the link when Sullivan pumped water over one hand while spelling the word into the other.

Which 1959 play, later a film, dramatized Anne Sullivan's teaching of Helen Keller?

The Miracle Worker. The title borrows Mark Twain's name for Sullivan, and Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke played teacher and pupil on Broadway before repeating the roles on film.

What did Gallaudet University students win by shutting down their campus for a week in 1988?

The school's first deaf president. The board had picked the only hearing finalist over two deaf ones; after a week of protest she resigned and I. King Jordan got the job.

ASL is traced to America's first lasting school for deaf children, which opened in which city?

Hartford, Connecticut. Pupils brought their own local and home signs, and these blended in the classroom with the European system their teachers used, so no one person invented the language.

Americans who sign may not understand British Sign Language, because ASL draws heavily on which country's signing?

France. In 1817 Laurent Clerc, a deaf teacher from France, helped open the first lasting American school for deaf children, and his signing mixed with what his pupils brought from home.

During the 1977 Section 504 sit-in at San Francisco's federal building, which group brought the disabled protesters hot meals?

The Black Panther Party. Its members kept the meals coming day after day, helping the protesters hold the building for nearly a month until the rules they wanted were signed.

Which activist, known as the "Mother of the Disability Rights Movement", helped organize the 504 sit-in?

Judith Heumann. In 1970 New York refused her a teaching licence because she could not walk; she sued, the board backed down and she became the first wheelchair user to teach in its schools.

The wheelchair access symbol, sketched by a Danish student in 1968, originally lacked which part?

A head. Susanne Koefoed drew a bare stick figure on a wheelchair; the committee that adopted it in 1969 added a circle on top so that the shape would read as a person.

Morris Frank and his dog Buddy helped found which guide dog school?

The Seeing Eye. Frank, who was blind, wrote to the author of a 1927 magazine article about dogs guiding blinded veterans, trained with Buddy in Switzerland and helped open the school in 1929.

The first guide-dog training schools were set up during World War I in which country?

Germany. The first school opened at Oldenburg in 1916 for soldiers blinded at the front, and an American dog trainer's magazine article about the schools later carried the idea to the United States.

The International Day of Persons with Disabilities, each 3 December, was proclaimed by which body?

United Nations. Its General Assembly proclaimed the day in 1992, the closing year of its Decade of Disabled Persons, to mobilise support for the dignity, rights and well-being of disabled people.

Who founded the Special Olympics, first held in Chicago in 1968?

Eunice Kennedy Shriver. The Games grew out of Camp Shriver, a summer day camp she ran in her own backyard in the early 1960s for children with intellectual disabilities.

Who became the first deaf performer to win an Academy Award, for Children of a Lesser God?

Marlee Matlin. She had been acting in a Chicago stage production of the same play, and the film that won her the Oscar was her first screen role.

Which 2021 film about the hearing daughter of deaf parents won Best Picture?

CODA. The film it remade had cast hearing actors as the deaf parents and been criticised for it; this time deaf actors played the deaf roles, signing in ASL.

Which Paralympic team sport for blind athletes is played with a ball that has bells inside?

Goalball. It was devised in 1946 to help rehabilitate soldiers blinded in the war, and crowds must stay silent during play so that the players can hear the ball.

Ed Roberts, father of the Independent Living movement, lived in a campus hospital with his iron lung while studying where?

UC Berkeley. Other severely disabled students joined him in the hospital wing, and from that group came the first Center for Independent Living, opened in the city in 1972.

The "curb cut effect" describes what?

Accessibility features benefiting far more people than intended. Curb ramps won by wheelchair users in the 1970s turned out to help anyone pushing a stroller, cart or suitcase.

Rosa's Law, signed by Barack Obama in 2010, replaced which term in US federal law with "intellectual disability"?

Mental retardation. Rosa Marcellino, nine, and her family had already had the phrase struck from Maryland's laws; her brother Nick's line was that what you call people is how you treat them.

Which condition gradually paralysed Stephen Hawking?

Motor neurone disease (ALS). Diagnosed at 21 and given a couple of years to live, Hawking lived another 55 and wrote A Brief History of Time along the way.

Temple Grandin, an early autistic memoirist, is a professor of what?

Animal sciences. She credits her eye for detail with showing her what frightens cattle, and meat companies hired her to redesign the way their animals are handled.

Julia joined the television cast of Sesame Street in 2017 as a Muppet with which condition?

Autism. On the show Big Bird has to repeat himself to get Julia's attention, and her puppeteer, Stacey Gordon, has a son on the autism spectrum.

Stephan Farffler, who built himself a hand-cranked wheelchair as a young man in 1655, followed which trade?

Watchmaker. Farffler could not walk, and his three-wheeled carriage, driven by cranks and cogs, is widely regarded as the first self-propelled wheelchair.

Daniel Day-Lewis won his first Oscar playing Christy Brown, an Irish writer and painter with cerebral palsy, in which film?

My Left Foot. Brown wrote and painted with the one limb he could control, and Day-Lewis stayed in a wheelchair even off camera, so the crew had to move him around the set.

Which inventor, whose mother and wife were both deaf, spent his early career teaching deaf students in Boston?

Alexander Graham Bell. He married one of his former pupils, Mabel Hubbard, and to the end of his life described himself first as a teacher of the deaf.

Franklin D. Roosevelt turned which spa resort into a paralysis treatment centre?

Warm Springs. Paralysed at 39, he hoped bathing there would restore his legs; it never did, but he set up a foundation at the resort to treat others and kept a cottage there known as the Little White House.

Which device, approved for American adults in the mid-1980s, bypasses the damaged ear and stimulates the hearing nerve directly?

The cochlear implant. A hearing aid only makes sounds louder; the implant's electrodes signal the nerve itself, which gives a useful sense of sound without restoring normal hearing.

Regular open-captioned TV broadcasts began in 1972 on which PBS cooking show?

The French Chef. Julia Child's show carried its captions open on screen for every viewer, because the system that lets a set switch hidden captions on and off was still being developed.

What was the US law known as IDEA called before 1990?

Education for All Handicapped Children Act. Gerald Ford signed it in 1975 while complaining that it promised more than Washington could deliver; Congress gave it the new name fifteen years later.

Which framework holds that people are disabled by barriers and attitudes around them rather than by their own bodies?

The social model. Its stock example is a flight of stairs: add a ramp and a wheelchair user is no longer shut out, whereas the medical model would set out to fix the person.

Which games for disabled athletes began in Paris in 1924?

The Deaflympics. They began as the International Silent Games, organised by Eugène Rubens-Alcais, himself deaf, to show what deaf athletes could do, decades before the Paralympics.

The Invictus Games for wounded service personnel take their name from a Latin word meaning what?

Unconquered. The Latin joins in-, "not", to victus, "conquered", and the name was chosen for the fighting spirit of injured service personnel.

Prince Harry's inspiration for Invictus came from his 2013 visit to which US military sports event?

The Warrior Games. Harry watched injured British servicemen and women compete there, and the following year he opened an international version in London.

Welsh racer Tanni Grey-Thompson, winner of 11 Paralympic golds, won which race six times?

London Marathon. Christened Carys, she owes the name Tanni to an older sister who called the newborn "tiny", and the last of her six wins came in 2002.

Which future soul star spent his boyhood at Florida's state school for deaf and blind children in St. Augustine?

Ray Charles. Blind by the age of seven, he was sent there by his mother, and it was at the school that he learned to play several instruments and to write arrangements.

Which childhood illness did Frida Kahlo contract in 1913, years before her bus accident?

Polio. It kept her away from other children for months and left her right leg weaker than the left; she took up painting only after the bus accident, during another long spell in bed.

In 1887 rentable 'rolling chairs' were introduced on the boardwalk of which seaside resort?

Atlantic City. Built as wheelchairs for invalid visitors, the chairs caught on with able-bodied tourists, who hired one, and an attendant to push it, as the smart way to see the Boardwalk.

Which Superman actor, paralysed from the neck down in a 1995 riding accident, became a leading campaigner for spinal injury research?

Christopher Reeve. He was acting again the following year, when he also started a foundation to fund research into spinal cord injuries.

Which screen reader, which reads on-screen text aloud for blind users, has been built into Windows since 2000?

Narrator. Because it comes with every copy of Windows there is nothing to buy or install, while Apple devices carry VoiceOver and Android phones TalkBack.

Share a Smile Becky, a 1997 doll who used a pink wheelchair, was sold as a friend of which toy?

Barbie's own Dream House let her new friend down: a teenager with cerebral palsy pointed out that Becky's wheelchair would not fit into its elevator.

Which football ritual is credited to Gallaudet quarterback Paul Hubbard, who feared rival teams could read his signs?

The huddle pulled his players into a tight circle so they could sign each play unseen, a real worry when the opponents were other deaf schools.

A roughly 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy found near Thebes was wearing a wooden prosthesis to replace which body part?

A big toe was no mere ornament: replicas tested by engineers in 2011 let wearers walk both barefoot and in Egyptian-style sandals.

Which actor, later famed for his deep voice, refused to speak for years as a boy because of a severe stutter?

James Earl Jones credited a high school English teacher, who found he had a gift for writing poetry, with helping him end his silence.

The bumpy tactile paving that alerts blind pedestrians at kerbs and platform edges was invented in which country?

Japan saw the first blocks in 1967, when Seiichi Miyake's design was laid in Okayama; they are known as Tenji blocks, after the country's name for braille.

Which musician used the very first production Kurzweil Reading Machine, a 1976 device that read printed text aloud?

Stevie Wonder heard about the machine on a TV morning show, and his friendship with its inventor later inspired a synthesizer built to mimic real instruments.

Which flower decorates the lanyards, launched with Gatwick Airport in 2016, that quietly signal a hidden disability?

A sunflower tells trained staff that the wearer may take longer or need extra help, without anyone having to ask or explain.

Sam Farber founded which kitchen brand after watching his wife, who had arthritis, struggle to grip ordinary tools?

OXO launched in 1990 with fifteen Good Grips tools, a swivel peeler among them, designed to be more comfortable for every cook and not only for her.

Which abolitionist had sudden sleeping spells after an overseer's thrown weight broke her skull?

Harriet Tubman also began having vivid dreams and visions after the injury, which she took to be premonitions from God.

An early form of which machine was built in Italy in the early 1800s so a blind countess could write letters?

The typewriter brought a second invention with it: Pellegrino Turri is credited with devising carbon paper to supply the machine's ink.

Which Canadian set out in 1980 to run across his country on an artificial leg, raising money for cancer research?

Terry Fox covered 5,373 kilometres in 143 days before the cancer spread to his lungs and forced him to stop outside Thunder Bay.

Which full-contact Paralympic sport, created in Winnipeg for players with quadriplegia, was first called murderball?

Wheelchair rugby was devised because basketball's dribbling and shooting pushed players with impaired arms as well as legs into supporting roles.

In later years Stephen Hawking controlled his speech computer by twitching a single muscle in which part of his body?

His cheek took over in 2005, once he could no longer squeeze a handheld switch, and it let him write at about one word a minute.

Deaf actress Millicent Simmonds helped teach her castmates to sign for which 2018 horror film about a family in hiding?

A Quiet Place has its characters sign to avoid making a sound, so the filmmakers also hired a deaf mentor to coach the actors and correct their signing.

Juliette Gordon Low, deafened in one ear by a grain of rice thrown at her wedding, founded which youth movement?

The Girl Scouts began in 1912 as two patrols of American Girl Guides in Savannah, Georgia, with just eighteen girls registered.

Deaf pupils first brought together in the late 1970s invented their own sign language in which Central American country?

Nicaragua gave linguists a rare chance to watch a language being born: the children built it in the schoolyard and on the bus, not from their teachers' lessons.

Disability Pride Month falls in which month, chosen to mark the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act?

July hosts the celebration, whose flag was redrawn in 2021 with muted colours and straight stripes so it would be safe for people with visually triggered conditions.

Bethany Hamilton went back to which sport less than a month after a tiger shark bit off her arm in 2003?

Surfing took her just 26 days to return to: she taught herself to ride with one arm and entered a major competition ten weeks after the attack.

Which drug, sold in the late 1950s for morning sickness, caused serious birth defects in more than 10,000 babies?

Thalidomide reached pharmacies in 46 countries, but it was kept off the American market by Frances Kelsey, an FDA reviewer who held up its approval.

On which Massachusetts island was hereditary deafness once so common that hearing neighbours routinely signed too?

Martha's Vineyard had one deaf resident in every 155 at its 1854 peak, against roughly one in 5,730 nationally, so signing was simply part of island life.

Wheelchair tennis keeps the standing game's court, net and rackets, but its rules let the ball do what?

Bounce twice is the allowance, and only the first of those bounces has to land inside the lines of the court.

Robert Louis Stevenson partly based which Treasure Island pirate on William Henley, a poet friend missing a leg?

Long John Silver took his crutch and fiery vitality from Henley, who wrote the poem Invictus in hospital while fighting to keep his other leg.

In Christine Miserandino's 2003 essay on life with lupus, which piece of cutlery stands for a unit of daily energy?

A spoon was simply what lay within reach: sitting in a restaurant, she gathered a handful and took one from her friend for every task in an imagined day.

Helen Keller graduated in 1904 as a member of Phi Beta Kappa from which women's college?

Radcliffe was paid for by Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers, to whom her admirer Mark Twain had introduced her.

Which company released the Adaptive Controller in 2018, a slim gamepad built for players with limited mobility?

Microsoft lined the back of its Xbox pad with nineteen sockets, one for each button, so players can plug in whichever assistive switches suit their bodies.

At the 1824 premiere of which symphony did a singer gently turn the deaf Beethoven around to face the applause?

His Ninth found him several bars behind, beating time for an orchestra he could not hear, when contralto Caroline Unger stepped over.

World Down Syndrome Day falls on which date, chosen to echo the extra third copy of a chromosome behind the condition?

21 March is the 21st day of the 3rd month, and supporters mark it by wearing bright mismatched socks, which are shaped a little like chromosomes.

In the IEP that American public schools must write for each pupil in special education, what does the 'I' stand for?

Individualized is the whole idea: the plan must be tailored to one student's needs and spell out how progress toward yearly goals is reported to parents.

An 1880 congress of deaf educators voted to ban sign language from schools while meeting in which Italian city?

Milan's ban was formally rejected only in 2010, when the same congress met in Vancouver and endorsed the use of sign languages.

Section 504, one of the first US federal civil rights protections for disabled people, belongs to which 1973 law?

The Rehabilitation Act survived two vetoes by Richard Nixon before it passed, and Section 504 borrowed its wording from the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

When Louis Braille's remains were moved to the Panthéon in 1952, which part of him stayed buried in his home village?

His hands stayed in Coupvray as a symbolic gesture, reburied close to his childhood home while the rest of him was carried to Paris.

Decades before Helen Keller, which child without sight or hearing learned to read at Perkins and was praised by Dickens?

Laura Bridgman had both senses taken by scarlet fever at two, and her Perkins friend Anne Sullivan went on to become Keller's own teacher.

Which vitamin, added to flour in many countries, lowers a baby's risk of spina bifida when taken in early pregnancy?

Folic acid is added to staple grains in dozens of countries, and mandatory national schemes have been linked to about 30% fewer births with spina bifida.

The term 'Paralympic' was first used officially at the 1988 Games, which shared Olympic venues in which city?

Seoul ended a 24-year stretch in which the two events were held in different cities, and Paralympians competed in many of the Olympic venues themselves.

Which service organisation adopted sight-saving as its cause after Helen Keller addressed its 1925 convention?

Lions Clubs heard Keller at Cedar Point, Ohio, where she charged the members to act as knights for blind people, and sight has been their cause ever since.

The word 'handicap' comes from 'hand in cap', which in the 1650s was the name of what?

A betting game it was: two players put forfeit money into a cap while an umpire set the odds, and the word reached horse racing well before it described disability.

A 2013 treaty easing copyright so books can be adapted for blind readers is named after which Moroccan city?

Marrakesh gave its name to a pact meant to end a so-called book famine, by allowing copyright exceptions for braille, audio and other adapted editions.

Which TV reporter won a Peabody for his 1972 exposé of conditions at Willowbrook State School on Staten Island?

Geraldo Rivera, then a young investigative reporter at a New York station, filmed overcrowded wards where children with intellectual disabilities were neglected and abused.

Which 2020 documentary, executive-produced by the Obamas, traces disability activism to a 1971 summer retreat for teens?

Crip Camp won the Audience Award at Sundance, and it follows campers from Camp Jened in New York as they grow into activists fighting for accessibility legislation.

Mr Tumble signs to viewers of the CBeebies show Something Special using which language programme of signs and symbols?

Makaton takes its name from the first letters of Margaret, Katherine and Tony, three members of the team that devised it at a Surrey hospital in the 1970s.

In Britain, red bands added to a white cane tell passers-by that its user also has which impairment?

Hearing loss is what the red bands add: a plain white cane signals a visual impairment with normal hearing, while the banded one marks its user as deafblind.

In Paralympic pools, why do assistants called tappers touch blind swimmers with a pole?

To warn of the wall is the tapper's job, timing each touch so the swimmer knows when to turn or finish; swimmers in the S11 class are required to use one.

Which nickname covers US city ordinances, some lasting until 1974, that kept visibly disabled people off the streets?

Ugly laws began in San Francisco in 1867, and Chicago's 1881 version fined anyone judged an unsightly object on its streets one dollar per offence.

Which Michigan city installed curb cuts in the 1940s as a pilot project to help disabled veterans get to work?

Kalamazoo's ramps were the project of Jack Fischer, a lawyer and veteran himself, who wanted disabled veterans to be able to reach jobs.

Which British admiral kept commanding fleets after battle wounds had cost him an arm and part of his sight?

Horatio Nelson was hit by a musket ball as he stepped ashore at Tenerife in 1797, and a surgeon amputated most of the arm after he insisted it come off quickly.

In 1978 nineteen wheelchair users blocked buses overnight to demand accessible public transport in which US city?

Denver's protesters, remembered as the Gang of Nineteen, staged what is counted as the first American demonstration for wheelchair-accessible public buses.

Which Paralympic sport, designed for players with cerebral palsy, has athletes throw leather balls at a white jack?

Boccia is a Paralympic cousin of bocce and boules with no counterpart on the Olympic programme, and it has since opened to players with other severe physical impairments.

A public sign showing an ear next to the letter T tells hearing aid users that which system is installed?

An induction loop sends sound as a magnetic field straight to the hearing aid, and the T stands for telecoil, a pickup first built to work with telephones.

Which epic poem did the poet Milton compose entirely by dictation after going blind in 1652?

Paradise Lost was spoken aloud to friends and helpers who wrote it down, and the image of Milton dictating to his daughters became a favourite subject for painters.

Which Marvel superhero is Matt Murdock, a lawyer blinded as a boy by a chemical spill that sharpened his other senses?

Daredevil's heightened senses were partly inspired by artist Bill Everett's legally blind daughter, whose hearing had grown more acute.