What's New and Updated at The Shining Lamp?

The Surgeon General warns that loneliness harms health like heavy smoking, and for people with developmental disabilities it’s driven by systems—not personal shortcomings. The piece argues that Disability Doesn’t Have To Mean Isolation: segregation in housing, day programs, and service models keeps people apart, so the public task is to redesign for connection and belonging. Cincinnati shows the stakes: adults with developmental disabilities experience some of Ohio’s lowest employment and participation rates because our systems prize placement over purpose. Employers, funders, and agencies…

Jeremy Smith opens with a clear turning point: on January 8, 2025, he walks into the Colorado Center for the Blind at 2233 West Shepperd Avenue. He names the cost of leaving Kentucky and traces early fear to years when retinitis pigmentosa wasn’t plainly explained—then sets a plain goal: rebuild the self he’s believed in. Instruction reads as craft with real stakes. Training lives in ordinary places—streets, stations, kitchens, conversations—so repeated practice and firm expectations steady his reactions. The deeper change is trust in himself; the tools of travel, tactile reading, and modern…

Audio description (AD) makes live and recorded performances come alive for blind and low-vision audiences. By narrating visual details—actions, settings, costumes, and more—it helps everyone fully experience theater, film, and other art forms. AD is now common in many movie theaters and on certain TV services, and it is gradually expanding into live theater. There, the description is often professionally produced and generally available for any performance once a show has been running for a while. These performances feature pre-recorded AD: individual sound clips carefully cued to match each…

Kathryn Bromwich states that horror still treats disability as shorthand for moral depravity. She names this pattern ableism. She cites Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. It is a Venice hit that stars only non-disabled performers. Victor receives prosthetics and amputations. The film confuses message with spectacle. She then traces older and newer screen habits—facial scarring, wheelchair use, amputation, and prosthetics as menace—showing how these choices teach audiences to read “Disability” as threat. She lists recent examples: Longlegs, The Substance, Heretic, Weapons, and Nosferatu’s…

Joni Eareckson Tada opens with Rebecca, an adult with cerebral palsy. Volunteers placed her with children at a family retreat. The error spotlighted something larger than one failure. Too many People with Disabilities are present in a room yet cut off from it. Tada asks communities to treat belonging as a shared responsibility. The article cites a national survey of working-age People with Disabilities in the United States. More than three in ten often lacked companionship. Over a third often felt left out. Nearly four in ten reported feeling isolated. The numbers describe neighbors…

NBC profiles Elana Meyers Taylor as a parent and disability advocate. She and her husband, Nicholas Taylor, raise sons Nico and Noah. “My boys travel with me as much as possible… All season long, six months on the road, they’re with me.” She uses her platform “to grow awareness and show what disability looks like on a day-to-day basis.” “I think the biggest problem we have in this society is that we don’t value those who aren’t able to achieve as much.” She is “a full proponent of everyone having value regardless of what they achieve.” Her roles are public and specific. She served as 2019…

New Jersey residents with disabilities report health care problems that damage safety and dignity. Kelly Boyd describes offensive comments, blocked entrances, and skipped weight checks during routine visits. These problems carry grave consequences. A 2022 World Health Organization report links higher illness and early death to unfair system factors and misattributed symptoms. Reporting documents patterns statewide: communication failures, too few clinicians accepting Medicaid, inaccessible equipment and rooms, and rushed appointments that miss warning signs. Some facilities are removing…

A Deaf parent brought their child to a Bismarck hospital during a medical emergency. The hospital’s video service for sign language failed, and there was no on-site American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter at the start. This blocked critical information in real time and is a communication failure the institution was obligated to fix by removing barriers. The article describes the harms that follow: key facts are missed or delayed during “life and death” conversations. Substituting lip-reading, family members, handwritten notes, or unstable video is not equal to a qualified interpreter.…

NationalWorld profiles broadcaster and disability-rights advocate Matthew Kayne, who turns years of hospital routines and system barriers into a creative act: writing and releasing “Free Like a Bird,” a song about agency, dignity, and removing barriers. The core idea is clear: music became his way to organize experience into purpose, blending art with activism to challenge ableist assumptions and advance anti-ableism—without pity framing. Writing and recording happened alongside cancer-treatment schedules and administrative hurdles; responses from listeners affirmed the message, while his…

Active Impact marks 15 years with a community celebration that showcases providers and families working together to remove barriers so children with disabilities participate can in local life alongside peers. Founded in 2010 by Jane Douch, Philip Douch and Paralympic cyclist James Brown after a Gloucestershire County Council programme, the organisation set out to grow providers’ capability so more groups offer inclusive activities instead of relying only on oversubscribed specialist options. Now a charity (since 2020) led by CEO Nicole Hastie and a part-time team with varied lived experience…

Chris McCausland recounts how losing his sight by early adulthood reshaped his path from software work to stand-up and television, and he argues that his career should be judged on craft and contribution, with representation in media framed as inclusion rather than exception. His core point: success isn’t perfection; it’s the connection you build. Strictly Come Dancing taught him to prioritise joy and rapport over scores, challenging the instinct to hold back work until it feels flawless. He traces milestones that reinforced this stance — a decade on CBeebies, a travel series, a Sky comedy…

Editor’s Note: Can you identify the systemic ableism that creates the very problem a Hidden Disabilities Sunflower lanyard or badge is meant to “fix”? Focus on how default policies, design choices, or staff behavior cause barriers in the process — and name the concrete changes that would eliminate those problems for People with Disabilities, rather than relying on afterthought identifiers like lanyards. Condé Nast Traveller surveys the Sunflower Lanyard’s first decade and asks how airports and airlines are advancing neuro-inclusive travel for neurodivergent passengers, framing airports as…

Kit, a TikTok creator known as @moonlit_kit, shares that she lives with conditions including POTS, Hypermobile EDS, and MCAS, and explains what she wishes people understood about her dynamic disability. Her core point is that a dynamic disability fluctuates in severity and impact—unlike a static disability—so how a person feels and what support they need can change day by day or even hour by hour, making planning hard. She notes that these changes often invite stigma: People with Disabilities may use a mobility aid one day and not the next, or manage a task one day and struggle the next, yet…

A new study reported by Forbes warns that self-driving car design still contains major accessibility blind spots—gaps that could exclude People with Disabilities, especially Blind/Low Vision riders, from safe, confident participation in everyday mobility. At its core, the message is simple: Accessibility is critical for the world's disability community, so autonomous vehicles must be co-designed with disabled riders from curb to interface—covering trip planning, hailing, boarding, seating, restraint operation, and clear nonvisual feedback. Researchers highlighted that disabled and…

The article argues that basic safety and comfort features—seat belts and public seating—remain exclusionary because standard designs and policies create barriers for People with Disabilities. It calls for planning grounded in inclusive design so equipment and layouts reflect real bodies, mobility, and sensory realities rather than a narrow default. Standard three-point restraints, hard-to-obtain extenders, and tie-down complexity shift responsibility onto disabled riders. The article points to a practical remedy: remove barriers by making adaptive restraints available by default and training…

The Disability Wellbeing Index (DWI) is presented as Australia’s first validated, disability-specific measure of wellbeing, developed by Monash University’s Centre for Health Economics with partners through extensive consultation with people with disability. It captures domains such as relationships, daily living, home, health, learning, work, finances, respect and dignity, safety, and participation, grounding policy measurement in lived experience. The authors explain that generic health tools have not reflected what matters to people with disability, creating an evidence gap that weakens…

Natalie Green, a 25-year-old advocate who has cerebral palsy, epilepsy and an intellectual delay, writes ahead of Utah’s Dignity Leadership Summit after asking 15 Utahns with connections to IDD what inclusion means to them. She frames inclusion as belonging and participation across daily life — from schools and workplaces to inclusive events — and shares where readers can find the full set of responses. Voices from Special Olympics athletes and coaches emphasize that inclusion is not token attendance but meaningful roles, leadership and friendship. Kyle “Pickles” Karren points to chances to…

This Brief But Spectacular segment features Micaela Connery reflecting on how a close family relationship led her to focus on homes and neighborhoods that welcome People with Disabilities as full neighbors, framing community as ordinary daily life shared in the same buildings, streets, and routines. She describes The Kelsey’s approach: mixed-income, mixed-ability housing where universal design, inclusive property management, and resident leadership are planned from the start to remove barriers that keep People with Disabilities out of typical apartments and community spaces. The segment…

The First Peoples Disability Network has launched a national survey to surface everyday problems and priorities from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People with Disabilities, aiming to turn lived experience into practical reforms. Responses will help map barriers in housing, health, education, transport, and justice so reforms start with community voice rather than assumptions; the approach centers cultural safety and disability pride. For Blind/Low Vision participants and others who prefer different formats, the call invites accessible ways to take part so stories are not lost to…