Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century
Accounts of grief and joy, independence and interdependence, challenge and transformative creativity
A magnetar is born in a gamma-ray burst, an incredibly powerful astronomical event that, nevertheless, cannot be seen with the naked eye. Instead, sighted physicists study graphs of light intensity over time to learn about this type of neutron star. Wanda Díaz-Merced lost access to this data when she lost her sight, leading her to come up with sonification – a way to translate intensity into sound. Not only did that innovation allow her to continue in her profession, but also it revealed new information about supernova explosions that had never been observed in visual representations of the same data. ‘Science is for everyone… it has to be available to everyone,’ she says.