Context - On Her Blindness

• The poem 'On Her Blindness' was written by Adam Thorpe
• The poem 'On Her Blindness' tells the true story of Thorpe's mother's disability and death
• The poem 'On Her Blindness', besides memorializing Thorpe's mother's bravery and pain, records Thorpe's anger at a world that doesn't know how to cope with a loss as great as blindness
• In the UK, the Royal National Institute for the Blind successfully demanded that political parties offer their manifestos in braille and audio forms - but only as recently as 1991
• In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act (which introduced anti-discrimination laws protecting people with handicaps) went into effect in 1990
• The Disability Discrimination Act became UK law in 1995 (later the Equality Act of 2010), to criminalise ableism and target those who exhibited discriminatory behaviour towards marginalised disabled people