'Fastest woman alive' was stunt double for Wonder Woman.

For one memorable stunt in the “Wonder Woman” television series, Kitty O'Neil jumped off the roof of a Hilton hotel in Los Angeles and fell 127 feet before landing on an inflated air bag, setting a new women’s high-fall record, The Washington Post reports. “If I hadn’t hit the center of the bag, I probably would have been killed,” she told the Post.

A barrage of childhood diseases, including mumps, measles and smallpox, nearly killed her at 5 months and left her deaf. Her Native American mother taught her sign language and lip reading.

She went on to play piano and cello, to train for the Olympics as a diver (injury and illness made her miss the Games) and to drive at 417 miles per hour.

After brushes with death that included spinal meningitis and cancer, she decided to test herself relentlessly. She became a legendary Hollywood stunt woman, standing in for Lindsay Wagner of “The Bionic Woman,” dangling out of a sixth-story window for an episode of the television detective show “Baretta,” braving rising waters on a sinking jet plane in the movie thriller “Airport ’77,” and rolling, crashing or racing cars for films such as “The Blues Brothers” and “Smokey and the Bandit II.”

She notched an average speed of 512.71 mph during two runs — obliterating the previous record of 321 mph, set by Lee Breedlove in 1965 — driving a hydrogen peroxide-fueled vehicle, and reaching a maximum of 618 mph.

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Blind voters need special machines.

Helen and William Craig are two of the most politically active citizens in Sitka, Alaska, KCAW reports.

An active Republican, William attended the party’s state convention this year as a delegate. Helen is an independent and at the Sitka Assembly meetings she asks members to sign “yes” or “no” as they vote in American Sign Language so she can follow along.

Helen lost her hearing at the age of seven from measles, mumps and rubella. 

William has Retinitis Pigmentosa in both eyes, and at age 38 he was diagnosed as legally blind.

After the Help America Vote Act was passed in 2004, the state bought accessible voting machines for all polling places that display the ballot on digital touch screens, equipped with magnified text and audio cues. At Sitka’s municipal election this year, the machine worked – it sometimes hasn’t in the past – and the city put up a big partition around the machine that allowed William to vote in absolute privacy.

Before this, William had to verbally dictate his vote to another person. 
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The Craigs appreciate this, but are they are frustrated by one thing: they still cannot participate in in-person absentee voting. None of Alaska’s absentee in-person voting locations have machines for the blind.

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Bernard Bragg founded the National Theater for the Deaf in 1967.

Bernard Bragg, a trailblazer for deaf performers, died at 90 on Oct. 29 in Los Angeles, The New York Times reports.

His longtime friend  Marlee Matlin confirmed his death.

He graduated in 1947 from the New York School for the Deaf, and continued his education at what was then Gallaudet College, where he studied theater and acted in school plays.

He enjoyed performing, but as a deaf person he had no obvious career path . He began teaching at the California School for the Deaf in Berkeley. Then, in 1956, he made a life-changing trip to see the mime Marcel Marceau perform in San Francisco.

After that he began appearing at clubs in the San Francisco area like the hungry i, working in his own invented style, which he called sign mime, combining elements of American Sign Language with the tools of mime.

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