Disability Trivia
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95 free Disability trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Disability history is full of firsts that most people never learn: the fifteen-year-old who invented braille, the veterans' games at a British hospital that grew into the Paralympics, the 25-day sit-in that forced the US government to enforce its own law, and the students who shut down a university until it hired a deaf president. This quiz covers those stories alongside the ADA and Capitol Crawl, ASL and Gallaudet, guide dogs and white canes, the wheelchair symbol, the curb cut effect, the UN convention, and figures from Helen Keller and FDR to Judith Heumann, Marlee Matlin and Temple Grandin. It is written for disability awareness events, classrooms and workplace training as much as for trivia fans. About a third of the questions are easy, a third are medium and the rest will stretch people who work in the field. Every answer is checked against a reference page for the law, event or person.
30 of 95 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which US president signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law?
George H. W. Bush
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."
Q 02What did disability rights protesters in Washington do in March 1990 to demand passage of the ADA?
Crawled up the Capitol steps
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.
Q 03The Paralympics grew out of a 1948 sports competition for British war veterans held at which hospital?
Stoke Mandeville
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.
Q 04Which German-Jewish neurologist founded the games that became the Paralympics?
Ludwig Guttmann
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.
Q 05Which city hosted the 1960 Games now recognized as the first Paralympics?
Rome
Rome. About 400 athletes from 23 countries competed there, but sharing the Olympic host city only became the standing arrangement from Seoul in 1988.
Q 06The Paralympic movement says the "para" in its name comes from a Greek word meaning what?
Beside
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.
Q 07How was the young Louis Braille blinded?
An accident with an awl in his father's workshop
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.
Q 08Which word, spelled into her palm by Anne Sullivan, gave Helen Keller her famous breakthrough?
Water
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.
Q 09Which 1959 play, later a film, dramatized Anne Sullivan's teaching of Helen Keller?
The Miracle Worker
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.
Q 10What did Gallaudet University students win by shutting down their campus for a week in 1988?
The school's first deaf president
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.
Q 11ASL is traced to America's first lasting school for deaf children, which opened in which city?
Hartford, Connecticut
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.
Q 12Americans who sign may not understand British Sign Language, because ASL draws heavily on which country's signing?
France
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.
Q 13During the 1977 Section 504 sit-in at San Francisco's federal building, which group brought the disabled protesters hot meals?
Q 21Which 2021 film about the hearing daughter of deaf parents won Best Picture?
CODA
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.
Q 22Which Paralympic team sport for blind athletes is played with a ball that has bells inside?
Goalball
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.
Q 23Ed Roberts, father of the Independent Living movement, lived in a campus hospital with his iron lung while studying where?
UC Berkeley
The Black Panther Party
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.
Q 14Which activist, known as the "Mother of the Disability Rights Movement", helped organize the 504 sit-in?
Judith Heumann
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.
Q 15The wheelchair access symbol, sketched by a Danish student in 1968, originally lacked which part?
A head
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.
Q 16Morris Frank and his dog Buddy helped found which guide dog school?
The Seeing Eye
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.
Q 17The first guide-dog training schools were set up during World War I in which country?
Germany
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.
Q 18The International Day of Persons with Disabilities, each 3 December, was proclaimed by which body?
United Nations
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.
Q 19Who founded the Special Olympics, first held in Chicago in 1968?
Eunice Kennedy Shriver
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.
Q 20Who became the first deaf performer to win an Academy Award, for Children of a Lesser God?
Marlee Matlin
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.
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.
Q 24The "curb cut effect" describes what?
Accessibility features benefiting far more people than intended
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.
Q 25Rosa's Law, signed by Barack Obama in 2010, replaced which term in US federal law with "intellectual disability"?
Mental retardation
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.
Q 26Which condition gradually paralysed Stephen Hawking?
Motor neurone disease (ALS)
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.
Q 27Temple Grandin, an early autistic memoirist, is a professor of what?
Animal sciences
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.
Q 28Julia joined the television cast of Sesame Street in 2017 as a Muppet with which condition?
Autism
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.
Q 29Stephan Farffler, who built himself a hand-cranked wheelchair as a young man in 1655, followed which trade?
Watchmaker
Watchmaker. Farffler could not walk, and his three-wheeled carriage, driven by cranks and cogs, is widely regarded as the first self-propelled wheelchair.
Q 30Daniel Day-Lewis won his first Oscar playing Christy Brown, an Irish writer and painter with cerebral palsy, in which film?
My Left Foot
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.