Helen Keller was born at 1880 in Alabama USA. She suffered from an illness at 19 months old, and she remained deaf, dumb and blind in a short of time. Because of that, she was not able also to speak for a long time.

Her parents were interested to find a teacher who could learn a child with those disabilities and they were fortunate enough, as appeared afterwards, to have a student of 20 years old, who suffered from an impaired vision herself. She was Anne Sullivan, which remained Helen’s companion for all of her life.

Sullivan arrived at Keller’s house when Helen was 7 years old. It was a full frustration for both of them at the very beginning. However after some time there comes a revelation for Helen when she was able to make the relation between the water running to one of her hands – with some motions that her teacher was making n the palm of her other hand. That was kind of awakening her abilities and that was just the beginning. She was eager to learn everything, 

Helen was the first person to earn a Bachelor degree on that condition.

Determined to communicate with others as conventionally as possible, Keller learned to speak and spent much of her life giving speeches and lectures on aspects of her life. She learned to “hear” people’s speech by reading their lips with her hands. She became proficient at using braille alphabet and reading sign language with her hands as well. On 1916, she travelled to a small town in Wisconsin to deliver a lecture for the students there. There she was, a wonderful girl who has so brilliantly triumphed over the triple afflictions of blindness, dumbness and deafness, gave a talk with her own lips on “Happiness,”.  Her speech it will be remembered always as a piece of inspired teaching by those who heard it. She spoke of the joy that life gave her. She was thankful for the faculties and abilities that she did possess and stated that the most productive pleasures she had were curiosity and imagination. Keller also spoke of the joy of service and the happiness that came from doing things for others…

Keller words that “helping your fellow men were one’s only excuse for being in this world and in the doing of things to help one’s fellows lay the secret of lasting happiness.” She also told of the joys of loving work and accomplishment and the happiness of achievement. Although the entire lecture lasted only a little over an hour, the lecture had a profound impact on the audience.

Keller went on to become a world-famous speaker and author. She is remembered as an advocate for people with disabilities, and for other causes. The deaf community was widely impacted by her. She traveled to twenty-five different countries giving motivational speeches about Deaf people’s conditions.

She was also a suffragette and a birth control supporter. 

She and George A. Kessler founded the “Helen Keller International”(HKI), an organization devoted to research in vision, health and nutrition.

There was a film based on her childhood life, titled “The Miracle Worker”,  where Anne Bancroft played Sullivan.

Keller wrote a total of 12 published books and several articles. She died at the age of 87, on June 1, 1968.