Helen Keller was an American author and educator who was blind and deaf. Her education and training represent an extraordinary accomplishment in the education of persons with these disabilities. When Keller was just 19 months old, she was afflicted with an illness that left her blind and deaf. After being examined by Alexander Graham Bell at the age of 6, she was sent to her a 20-year-old teacher, Anne Sullivan from the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston. Sullivan remained with Keller until her own death.Sullivan taught her how 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. Over the years, having developed skills never approached by any similarly disabled person, Keller began to write of blindness.