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Wheels with Wings: Healing Takes Flight
By Lisa Wells, Wheel-Life.org In 2004, at the age of 24, Natalie Marie Barnhard was working as a physical therapist assistant and licensed massage therapist—a great job in a field about which she was extremely passionate. Then a catastrophic accident changed her life when a 600-pound exercise weight machine fell over and landed on top of…
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Accessible and Universal Home—Thinking Beyond the Wheelchair
By Deborah Pierce, AIA, CAPS, Author of The Accessible Home Accessibility is usually a low priority when young families are house-hunting. Good schools, certainly, a modern kitchen—these features top most lists. Homes that are environmentally safe, that reduce the chance of injury, and that accommodate all our interests—these features aren’t even on the radar screen,…
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What is Your Passion for Dance?
By Amy Meisner-Threet, SAG-AFTRA, MSW To dance or not to dance? That is not even a consideration for many despite what may appear to others to be obvious obstacles. By creating the full length documentary film A Passion for Dance, Dancer Donna Russo and Choreographer Tam Warner are determined to change the conversation about what it means…
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Creative Expression Knows No Limits with Zot Artz
When that old English playwright said the pen was mightier than the sword, it’s safe to assume that he’d never considered the paintbrush. Especially not Dwayne Szot’s style of paintbrush. Because had the writer ever witnessed the profound effect on the children whose wheelchairs have been literally transformed into giant paintbrushes, that play would have gone…
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Lofty and Accessible
By Deborah Pierce, Pierce Lamb Architects Kathy Tarantola Photography Lofts are intriguing spaces when it comes to universal design. Their characteristic open-plan layout makes them supremely accessible – minimum walls and doorways to present barriers to getting around. Many of the homes featured in my book The Accessible Home: Designing for All Ages and Abilities resemble lofts on…
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Myth-Busting – Four Rumors about Home Accessibility
By Deborah Pierce, Author of The Accessible Home: Designing for All Ages and Abilities How much do you really know about home accessibility? There is a lot of misconception and downright fear about modifying the home. Movies like “The Money Pit” or “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” promise you’ll go broke or crazy! On the…
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A Child With Autism Reaches Out
A Poem by Berg Two and a half years ago, 7-year-old Berg came to Horse Boy World burdened with a diagnosis of PDD-NOS and selective mutism. Virtually non-verbal, she rarely made eye contact, would tense her body into a stiff leg/back posture, would avoid all body contact and suffered from regular, long-lasting meltdowns. She lived…
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The ‘Backbones’ to Living Fully with SCI
By Mike Ervin, Abilities Expo Ambassador For Reveca Torres, the key to recovery from her spinal cord injury was connection. Finding the disability community meant finding the technology, tips, resources and moral support that helped her realize disability wouldn’t destroy her dreams. That’s why she founded Backbones in 2008. Her mission, she says, is to “connect people…
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Product Spotlight: Crafted Elegance
It turns out that frustration is the mother of invention too. When Dianalynn Varin was diagnosed with CIDP, an autoimmune disease that affects the nervous system, she realized that she would have to drastically change her work habits. She needed to stay in a home environment where she could remain productive, while better accommodating herself, her…
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REV UP for National Disability Voter Registration Week
By Zach Baldwin, American Association of People with Disabilities There are over 35 million people with disabilities who are eligible to vote in the U.S. This number increases to over 62 million when we include family members in the same household, according to Rutgers University. The number of “disability voters” continues to grow when we consider the…
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They KNOW They Can Dance!
By Bonnie Lewkowicz, AXIS Dance Company and Abilities Expo Ambassador Axis Dance Company. Joel Brown and Sebastian Grubb.Photo by Michele Kumi-Baer AXIS Dance Company, based in Oakland, California, creates, performs, and teaches “physically integrated dance”—a contemporary dance form that evolves from the collaboration between dancers with and without disabilities. In existence for 25 years, we…
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25 Years Later, and NO ONE puts AXIS Dance Company in a Corner!
By Liam Passmore, Shave and a Haircut In 1987 when the Bay Area’s own AXIS Dance Company first performed, gas was 89 cents per gallon, The Simpsons debuted on FOX, and Prozac had only just become available to a country flocking to see a movie called Dirty Dancing, which spawned the catchphrase, “No one puts…