Disability Rights

From a very young age, Judy Heumann heard the word NO. When she wanted to attend public school, the principal said NO. When she wanted her teaching license, the New York Board of Education said NO. Judy and people with disabilities everywhere were tired of hearing “NO.”

Helen Adams Keller was an American author, handicap rights champ, political activist, and speaker who lived from June 27, 1880 to June 1, 1968. She was born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, and following a bout of health problem at the age of 19 months, she lost both her sight and hearing. Keller used home signals till she was seven years of age, when she met Anne Sullivan, her first instructor and long-lasting partner, who taught her language, and that includes reading and writing.

Learning disabilities (LD) are a root cause of major problems in our society. Vast numbers of youngsters are not receiving appropriate education. Nancy Lelewer’s story began when even less was known about learning disabilities than is known today. In a gripping and fast-moving narrative style, this audiobook brings home the fact that LD persons need to receive instruction via different routes and the earlier the better.

When someone would tap along and rescue me from being sandwiched between these two hardbacks, sorry, did I frighten you? You never heard or seen a talking book. Well, me either. The majority of the time, I am the only one in the room, or shall I say, “on the shelf”? So many humans walk right past me, playing blind games by pretending not to see that the struggle is real. Talk about the lack of accessibility.

This is Nadina LaSpina's story - from her early years in her native Sicily, where she contracts polio as a baby, a fact that makes her the object of well-meaning pity and the target of messages of hopelessness, to her adolescence and youth in America, spent almost entirely in hospitals where she is tortured in the quest for a cure and made to feel that her body no longer belongs to her, and to her rebellion and her activism in the disability-rights movement.