With the help of dedicated teacher, Anne Sullivan, Helen learned to feel objects and associate them with words spelled out by finger signals on her palm, to read sentences by feeling raised words on cardboard and to make her own sentences by arranging words in a frame within months. She also learnt braille at the Perkins Institute. Then she began a slow process of learning to speak under Sarah Fuller of the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston. She also learned to lip-read by placing her fingers on the lips and throat of the speaker while the words were simultaneously spelled out for her. She won admission to Radcliff College in 1900 and graduated cum laude in 1904.

Helen Keller began to write during her student life. She wrote on blindness, disabilities, social issues, demanding peace in the world, protesting war and genocide, empowerment of women and the disabled and other issues. She used to write/type the manuscript in braille, after that the manuscripts were typed with a manual typewriter. She wrote of her life in several books, including The Story of My Life (at the age when Helen was only 23), Optimism, The World I Live In, My Religion, Helen Keller's Journal, and The Open Door. Helen Keller could speak, read and write in five languages: English, French, German, Greek, and Latin.

Helen Keller wrote in her essay that we should have four things to learn in our life. Those are:

In life to think clearly without hurry or confusion,

To love everybody sincerely,

To act in everything with the highest motives, and

Trust in dear God unhesitatingly.

When Helen was only nine years old, she wrote: "I can not see the lovely things with my eyes, but my mind can see them all and so I am joyful all the day long." At a young age Helen Keller wrote: "Every child has the right to be well-born, well-nurtured and well-taught, and only the freedom of woman can guarantee him this right." In fact, Helen Keller is well known in the whole world for her outstanding, noble contributions. This is why to work in the field of disability we must go back to Helen Keller to devote ourselves like her.

We are really very lucky to get Helen Keller among us, but what we see when we look at the measurable condition of the disabled in our country Bangladesh? About fifteen million disabled people and most of them are being treated as second-class citizens! Disabled people are deprived from which they deserve for the lack of braille textbooks, opportunity of education, training, job, inferior mentality towards them etc. Also poverty plays a role to pull back the disabled, creates obstacles to go ahead and these causes are making them more vulnerable.

This is why we should awake up fully now and let us recognise the problems/obstacles to take necessary, time-appropriate initiatives for the disabled earlier on behalf of the government of Bangladesh, civil society, NGOs, i.e., each one of us has to take the responsibility to help at least one disabled person to be an active part like the normal people in our family, society, and the country.

The author is a columnist and freelance journalist.