Maybe I’m being too harsh? I can’t see? So it’s possible I rely too heavily on the way things sound? I’m walking down the street? Or sitting at our local tavern? Hackneys? And people around me talk? As if they aren’t sure what they’re saying? They ask questions? But never pause for an answer?

By now you’ve all experienced this upspeak phenomenon, but Tuesday’s Fresh Air interview on NPR gave me a new perspective on it all. Terry Gross interviewed Susan Sankin, one of the voice experts featured in a new documentary called Do I Sound Gay? The film was produced by David Thorpe, a gay man who had a problem with his voice — he thought it sounded annoying and stereotypically gay. Thorpe narrates the film, which follows him as he looks for insights and advice from experts and talks to gay friends about his voice and their voices. He also talks to several gay people with very familiar voices, including David Sedaris, Tim Gunn and Dan Savage.

In the interview Terry Gross asked Thorpe and Sankin, a language and speech pathologist, what they thought were the distinctive qualities of the “gay voice.” Their answers:

• dentalizing the “S” sound
• overexaggeration
• hanging onto vowels
• upspeak

“Upspeak is that tendency to kind of speak in that way where you’re going up makes your voice sound a little bit musical,” Sankin said. “I think that’s what people associate with a gay sound to some degree.” From the interview:

GROSS: So you’re hearing that more in men and women, and in girls and boys? SANKIN: The upspeak, definitely. Initially when I heard it, it was among younger women. It seems now, though, that men have caught on as well. It’s just across the genders, it’s across age categories, and it’s become as contagious as the common cold.

Sankin explained how she had filmmaker David Thorpe read the Gettysburg Address so he’d understand and hear how much more authoritative and assertive he’d sound if he didn’t speak that way. She said upspeak makes people sound very immature and very unsure of themselves. Four Score? And seven years ago? Our forefathers Brought forth? On this continent? A new nation? Conceived in Liberty? “It’s almost as if they’re asking for approval.”

And so, just for fun, let’s end by rewriting my first paragraph with more declarative punctuation. Tell me how it sounds.

Maybe I’m being too harsh. I can’t see, so it’s possible I rely too heavily on the way things sound. I’m walking down the street, or sitting at our local tavern, Hackney’s, and people around me talk as if they aren’t sure what they’re saying. They ask questions, but never pause for an answer.

The newfangled treadmills at the gym I go to have TVs attached, and usually, I try to match my appointment with the treadmill with a baseball game. This past Friday, though, there was no baseball while I was working up a sweat. So as I channel surfed, I bumped into coverage of the Wimbledon tennis tournament.

It was immediately clear, from the roars of the crowd, that I’d landed in the middle of a very intense match. Serena Williams, the American force of nature who’s on an incredible winning streak, was facing Britain’s own Heather Watson. And Watson was getting the better of Williams in the deciding third set.

The incomparable Serena Williams.

The British fans cheered deliriously both when Watson would make a good shot, and also when Williams would make a bad shot. Which raised my patriotic hackles a bit, and got me invested in the match very quickly, even though I’m not really a tennis fan.

Williams was making uncharacteristic errors. She seemed a bit off-balance. And it really felt like it was Serena against the entire stadium. But, on the verge of elimination, Williams found her calm, cool, collected inner assassin and won a game with four straight 100+ mph service aces to put the Brit on the ropes. And Williams went on to win the third and deciding set, earning the right to play her big sister Venus in the next round. They’ve been around for so long that somehow, I’d begun taking them for granted. But the Williams sisters are one of the most remarkable stories in all of sports.

Then, last night, the U.S. Women’s team won the World Cup, blitzing the Japanese team and going up 4-0 in the first half of the first half. They played a fantastic game, and seemed to absorb a lot of physical contact in the process. The win was especially sweet for those team members who were on the team four years ago, when the Americans seemed to outplay the Japanese women, but lost in heartbreaking fashion. It was pretty good for us fans who watched back then, too.

At the end of the weekend, it occurred to me that we—or I—have come a long way when it comes to women in sports. I posted last year about how Title IX opened the doors for women participating in sports.

That’s been a big change in my lifetime, so I’ve been conscious, as I watched some of these events, that I’m watching women play. It was kind of a novelty.

These days, I watch because they’re damn good, and it’s fun to watch.

Twenty-five short years ago, the United States Capitol had no wheelchair ramps. You read that right. The monument that pretty much defines American equality and justice was inaccessible to people using wheelchairs.

Disable demonstrators crawl the Capitol steps. Photo: Action for Access, Tom Olin

In 1990, activists in Washington, D.C. struggled out of their wheelchairs and crawled up the Capitol steps to urge lawmakers to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Capitol Crawl and other demonstrations across the country were modeled on tactics used in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and they helped push legislators to pass the ADA on July 26, 1990 — 25 years ago.

While the memoir classes I lead are on a short hiatus, I’ve been dedicating more time to my part-time job at Easter Seals Headquarters in Chicago. I’m the Interactive Community Coordinator there, which is just a fancy title that means I moderate the Easter Seals Blog. I keep my ear open for articles and issues concerning disabilities and recruit guest bloggers to write posts about those topics. They email the posts to me, I edit them and add html code, and, presto! Their posts get published.

Come to think of it, You have Easter Seals to thank — or blame — for this Safe & Sound blog. It was at Easter Seals that I learned to use the blogging tools, and now this month at Easter Seals we are “celebrating one of the most important civil rights legislations of our time.”

Accessible design is so common now that some people find it hard to remember life without curb cuts, wheelchair ramps and Braille on elevator buttons. An NPR reporter interviewed Katy Neas, a colleague of mine from Easter Seals Headquarters to remind us what things were like back in the 20th Century.

Katy told the reporter that back then too many people with disabilities were out of sight and out of the minds of the general public. “There was a lot of ignorance about the interests and abilities of people with disabilities,” she said. “Discrimination and low expectations were part of the mainstream culture. Why would someone who uses a wheelchair want to go to the movies? Why would someone who is blind want to eat in a restaurant?”

That last quote stopped me in my tracks. We’ve come a long way, baby. I learned at work that 25 years ago, Easter Seals hired a Minneapolis ad agency to create posters for adults and children with disabilities to bring along to protests and events across the country. The posters were used in print public service announcements, too. More from the NPR story:

As an outspoken advocate for the ADA, Easter Seals created a series of powerful posters that illustrated the dilemmas — and desires — of disabled Americans and helped the country understand the reasons for, and responsibilities resulting from, the anti-discrimination legislation.

We’ve still got a ways to go (25 years after the ADA was passed, the unemployment rate among people who are blind still hovers around 75%) but we really have come a long way in a short time. Just look at the posters now for an idea of what things were like for people with disabilities back in the dark ages. Happy Independence Day to Americans with Disabilities.

Back in college, I took a course called “The History of Communications.” Taught by a Teaching Assistant in the Ph.D. program named Carolyn Marvin (now on the faculty at the Annenberg School at Penn), it was one of those courses that changed the way I looked at things. Forever.

The course looked at advances in communications technology, from hieroglyphics to the telegraph to the telephone to—what was then, in 1977, the next frontier—the digital age. The curriculum charted the scientific advancement in tandem with the commercial and cultural waves created by the innovations. And it opened my eyes to this: The notion of the boy inventor, of divine inspiration, of magical breakthroughs—is mostly rot.

This isn’t to be a killjoy. Quite the contrary. Because the alternate story, the more accurate one, is more inspiring, more powerful, and more optimistic than that of the brilliant individual.

That alternate story goes like this: We identify, for shorthand purposes, wunderkind inventors. Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Steve Jobs. These people played critical roles, but in reality, they’re contributions were part of a continuum–noteworthy dots on a timeline of hard, persistent work that came before their time, and that was being done in their own time by others—often competitors.

This, to me, is the ultimate collaboration, a collaboration spanning time and space. We toil as individuals, but stand on the shoulders of others, and we contribute to and benefit from the work of others.

You can pretty much take any important technology or scientific advance and find the same story. In the 1990s I had the great good luck of being present at the creation of what we now call the Internet and the World Wide Web. Some upstart, brilliant University of Illinois students created the graphical Web browser, a program called Mosaic.

As is our society’s wont, we identified a boy wonder—in this case, a native Wisconsinite named Marc Andreessen. He and his coding buddies were recruited by a Silicon Valley mogul named Jim Clark (himself already mythologized) to found a company first named Mosaic Communications, then renamed Netscape.

It was brilliant public relations, and Andreessen and company were without question talented young turks. (Andreesen has gone on to be a successful venture capitalist.)

But really, what they managed to do would not have been possible without the hard work and genius of those who came before them.

Those included, among others, Tim Berners-Lee and Vincent Cerf. Way back in 1969, the progenitor of the Internet was the Advanced Research Projects Network (ARPANet), a government-funded project that allowed defense researchers to collaborate electronically.

And on and on and on. For every big deal technological advancement, you’ll find an epic saga that is more complicated but more compelling than the popular story. (Do you really think Newton figured out gravity from a falling apple?)

I was reminded of all this awhile back by an essay called It Is, in Fact, Rocket Science. In it, the author debunks misunderstandings about Charles Darwin’s work—here’s an excerpt:

The mythical stories we tell about our heroes are always more romantic and often more palatable than the truth. But in science, at least, they are destructive, in that they promote false conceptions of the evolution of scientific thought.

This past week, I began to think the same dynamic is true in terms of the slow but steady march of societal progress. Good people have been at the task of universal health coverage for decades and decades. (We’re still not there, but we’re a lot closer.)

People have been working for civil rights—like the right to vote, reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities, and same-sex marriage—forever. They’ve been working at it through organized advocacy, but also by speaking up at the dinner table or at social gatherings—even when that wasn’t easy to do.

All this progress—technological and social—relies on individual doggedness, resolve, and brilliance. But, like jazz, it doesn’t work if it’s not connected in purpose.

Finally, David Remnick of The New Yorker had this reflective piece—Ten Days in June—about the tumultuous last week and a half. This passage, quoting President Obama, struck me as consistent with this broader idea I’ve been thinking about.

“. . . we’re on this planet a pretty short time, so that we cannot remake the world entirely during this little stretch that we have. … But I think our decisions matter. And I think America was very lucky that Abraham Lincoln was President when he was President. If he hadn’t been, the course of history would be very different. But I also think that, despite being the greatest President, in my mind, in our history, it took another hundred and fifty years before African-Americans had anything approaching formal equality, much less real equality. I think that doesn’t diminish Lincoln’s achievements, but it acknowledges that, at the end of the day, we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.”

That’s a pretty good paragraph, if you ask me.

U of I graduate Sandra Murillo.

If you follow this blog, you already know guest blogger Sandra Murillo. Sandra lost her sight when she was three years old. She has always attended regular public schools, and has known she wanted to be a writer ever since her sophomore year at Thornwood High School in South Holland, Ill.

Sandra’s first guest post was about using assistive technology to vote in her first presidential election, and the last time we published a guest post by Sandra was when she’d just graduated from University of Illinois journalism school and was looking for a job.

Good news! Sandra is working full-time at the Chicago Lighthouse for the Blind – she is a regular contributor to The Beacon (a weekly radio program on disability issues) and runs a weekly column there.

Sandy’s View features Sandra’s responses to commonly asked questions about the challenges facing people who are blind or have visual impairments. This week’s question was about how people who are blind manage to swim, and Sandra was kind enough to include an excerpt from my memoir Long Time, No See there to help answer that question.

The posts I write here about ways I manage to do things without being able to see always get a lot of comments, so if you’re interested in learning more, I highly recommend you look at them from Sandy’s View. Congratulations on the new job, Sandra!