What's New and Updated at The Shining Lamp?

In Nebraska, Latina mothers are collaborating with local police through the Project Lifesaver initiative to enhance safety for children with disabilities. This partnership focuses on removing barriers to ensure that children with disabilities can fully participate in their community activities. Project Lifesaver provides children with specialized tracking bracelets that emit a signal, helping emergency responders locate them quickly if they wander away. This critical tool addresses safety concerns and ensures that these children are included in their communities without unnecessary risks.

Miranda Lacy and Harold Rogers became fast friends during their undergraduate years. Both students are Blind and say learning materials, from course modules to readings for class, have been inaccessible to them at West Virginia University (WVU). Many documents are not compatible with a screen reader, which is software that translates what is visually represented on a webpage into audible speech. Rogers opened a PDF from one of his classes: a word in the title had an extraneous gap, so the automated voice of the screen reader said "misspell, misspell, misspell," as if it's repeatedly walking into a virtual wall. Rogers navigated down to an image of a chart. "Unlabeled text box, unlabeled image, page break," the reader said. Both students say they have encountered dozens of inaccessible documents in a single semester, and that they have spent more time troubleshooting their education in the past three years than actually learning. Digital accessibility is a major barrier for Blind students and other Students with Disabilities. It is an ever-changing landscape that often isn't designed with disabilities in mind.

At her university graduation, Melissa Parker, a wheelchair user, was making her way toward the stage to receive her degree when a woman organising the event casually called her "wheelchair-bound." Those words hung in the air. Simple and unthinking, they struck her deeply. Her thoughtless words made Parker feel so small and exposed. Parker didn't respond, and just collected her certificate as if nothing happened. Yet every time she leaves the house or goes online, Parker braces herself for insensitive language. It's exhausting. The term "wheelchair-bound" makes the wheelchair she's had since…

The voices and experiences of parents of children with disabilities are often diminished in a social media world that promotes the perfect parenthood myth — even the more honest portrayals of parenthood tend to do so through a very limited, very middle-class lens; recently, high-profile parents have made that barrier visible, including Jesy Nelson, whose Amazon documentary detailed her twin daughters' premature birth, with both girls now diagnosed with Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type 1 (SMA1), a genetic neuromuscular disease meaning they may never walk, and Katie Price, who has expressed fresh concerns for her son, who has rare genetic conditions causing severe weight management issues and low vision.

Every March, social media fills with messages recognizing National Cerebral Palsy Awareness Month. To many people, it may seem like just another awareness campaign. But for the millions living with cerebral palsy and the families who love them, it represents something much deeper: visibility, understanding and the hope for a more barrier-free and accessible future. Oklahoma is no exception. It's estimated that 691,000 people in the state have at least one disability. Based on a population of nearly 4 million and applying the national prevalence rate of about 3 cases per 1,000 people, it is estimated that roughly 12,000 Oklahomans are affected by cerebral palsy. My childhood came with barriers like extra doctor appointments, physical hurdles and a world that wasn't always built for someone like me. Still, when I went across the stage at my college graduation, diploma in hand, I felt like I had finally moved past those barriers. I believed graduating with honors proved that perseverance could carry me through anything. Soon after, though, I faced a harsh reality. Opportunity doesn't always follow achievement. And the job market wasn't always ready to see past my disability.

Disability advocates have fought to break down barriers, to be seen, valued, and included—not as a charity case, not as a box to be ticked, but as equal contributors to society. There are 8 billion people on this planet—more than 1.3 billion of them are People with Disabilities. People with Disabilities are not a minority. When inclusion policies were first introduced, they were meant to level the playing field—to recognize marginalized communities and create opportunities that had long been denied. But somewhere along the way, the process became diluted.

Taussig started using a wheelchair when she was 6 years old, and when she discovered disability studies in her late 20s during graduate school, she understood, for the first time in her life, disability as an identity — and this changed everything. She started creating what she called "mini-memoirs" on social media that brought readers into her firsthand experience of disability: the feeling of being stared at as she grips the side of her car, of being prayed over by strangers for her healing, of realizing as a little girl that none of the princesses looked like her. She started to understand the wheelchair as part of her brand — the image people recognize as they scroll — and over time rarely deviated from posts directly tied to disability; even if it wasn't at the center of the story, she made sure to connect the dots with a bold line for readers. She claims the titles disabled mother and disabled writer joyfully, yet reflects that brands aren't meant to capture every layer — they're curated — and as a collection, her posts inevitably drew a portrait missing some dimension.

When an explosion during a training exercise he had led at Camp Lejeune in February 1944 took the sight of Marine Lieutenant Thomas Hasbrook, ableist assumptions about blind people closed in immediately. Tom himself had absorbed the belief that blindness excluded him from meaningful work and contribution, and he told his wife of eleven months, Mary Jane, to divorce him — for perhaps the hundredth time. Mary Jane refused every time. Rather than accept those barriers, she brought a typewriter to the hospital and taught him to type. His mother began learning Braille herself and taught Tom as she…

HuffPost launches this new section to center People with Disabilities as authors of their own lives, and the editor’s story about her best friend explains why that matters. At 23, her friend had a stroke, woke up in an Intensive Care Unit with locked-in syndrome, and endured months of paralysis, rehab, speech therapy, and other treatment before using eye-controlled technology to blog and write again. By rejecting inspiration porn and insisting that Telling our stories is resistance, the article makes clear that disability coverage must be led by truth, authorship, and power rather than pity.…

Illinois is in a multi-year rollout to ensure companies pay all workers a fair wage. Governor JB Pritzker signed the Dignity in Pay Act last year, requiring companies to pay workers with Disabilities at least minimum wage by 2029, putting an end-date on disability-based pay inequity in Illinois. The state law diverges from the United States Department of Labor’s 14(c) waiver program, which allows employers to pay less than minimum wage to workers whose disabilities, employers argue, limit their productivity. State Representative Theresa Mah, the law’s lead sponsor, rejected that framing at a…

Laycie Beck reports on Emma Sellars, now 24, whose life changed at 16 when doctors diagnosed ulcerative colitis, a chronic inflammatory bowel disease, followed by years of medication, infusions, steroids and injections for flare-ups and severe pain. By 18, she says the side effects left her with “no choice” but surgery to form an ileostomy and remove her large bowel, leaving a stoma and a bag to collect waste, and she says the surgery “saved my life.” She has since undergone nine more surgeries and, since 2022, needed artificial nutrition through a feeding tube into her small bowel—realities…

Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi argues that disability inclusion in Jewish life must shift from “good intentions” to expectation because People with Disabilities and their families have been pushed out of core community spaces. She writes that a beloved family member was excluded from Jewish life because Jewish organizations were “not willing or able” to include people with disabilities, and she adds that many other families experienced the same exclusion. Being “excluded from Jewish schools, camps and other experiences” is a direct denial of belonging that institutions can—and must—stop normalizing.…

Abdulla Al Humaidan argues that, for decades, disability inclusion has been framed as charity, compliance or corporate social responsibility, and that this framing keeps People with Disabilities stuck with “pilot programmes that never scale”, roles that “lack advancement”, and initiatives that “quietly disappear once the grant cycle ends”. He rejects symbolic participation that depends on temporary funding or branding cycles, warning that inclusion treated as a “moral gesture rather than an operational strategy” rarely survives market realities. The article’s first demand is structural: stop…

Raffi Stein-Klotz, 24, is part of an adult Jewish learning series created specifically for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities at Jewish Association for Residential Care (JARC), where he and his housemates study Genesis, learn terms in Hebrew and English, and practice “boker or” and “boker tov.” The article makes clear why this matters: advocates say there are “few if any options” for formal adult Jewish education tailored to them, leaving adults pushed out of the learning that shapes Jewish life—until programs commit to providing “Jewish academic resources for adults with…

Days ahead of the Winter Paralympics—when athletes with disabilities will take center stage at the Milan Cortina Games—a choir from northern Italy performed a pop music concert inside Milan’s Sant’Antonio church, calling for harmony and inclusion—particularly of those with disabilities. The article’s core conflict is that visibility at major events does not automatically translate into belonging; People with Disabilities are still too often treated as an “add-on” audience instead of equal community members whose access and participation must be built into public life. The Archdiocese of Milan…

Nancy Bischoff’s essay opens on a cliff edge of uncertainty: in her early 30s, after “running from a failed relationship,” she scans an online ad that reads, “Veteran with a disability needs helper. Free room and board, in exchange for light housekeeping.” Her best friend warns her off, but she goes anyway, chasing detachment and a reset in a new city. When she reaches the house, the risk hits her body—“warning bells were going off,” her hands are sweating—and then the door opens to an older, white-haired man using a wheelchair and connected to an oxygen tank. He is not asking to be pitied…

This Edinburgh Live article profiles Midlothian author Colin Burnett, a 35-year-old man from Bonnyrigg who has autism and also lives with dyslexia and dyspraxia, as he prepares to publish his third book while confronting how teachers tried to shut down his future. He says he was “laughed at” and discouraged at school, repeatedly told it would be “too difficult” for him to go to university, and remembers telling an English teacher he wanted to become a writer someday and she laughed in my face. The article does not treat this as a harmless memory: it shows how educators’ ridicule and low…