Sarah Todd Hammer was eight years old, adjusting her tights after ballet class, when her arms suddenly fell limp at her sides. By the next morning, she was paralyzed from the neck down. Her childhood changed overnight and so did her relationship with the world around her.
That night, she was rushed from an urgent care to the ER, where doctors dismissed her symptoms and sent her home. “The doctor didn’t believe that anything was wrong,” she says. “My mom was pleading for him to do something.” By morning, she couldn’t move her legs either. An ambulance took her back to the hospital, where she was finally diagnosed with transverse myelitis, later reclassified as acute flaccid myelitis, a rare condition that damages the spinal cord.
“So I had a spinal cord injury from C2 to T1,” she explains. “I can walk, but I can’t move my left hand at all, and my right hand’s weak, and I can’t move my shoulders.”
She had been a serious young dancer, with big plans and pointed toes. “I dreamed of being a professional ballerina,” she says. Instead, she began growing up with a disability she never saw coming and no blueprint for what life with one might look like. “I didn’t have any family members with disabilities… it just wasn’t something I was surrounded by.”
That lack of visibility shaped her early experiences. It also became a reason to start speaking out.
At eleven, she co-wrote a memoir with a girl she met during treatment. They called it 5k, Ballet, and a Spinal Cord Injury . The project began as a personal experiment: her co-author was already into writing, and Sarah Todd figured she’d give it a try. “It started out just for fun,” she says. But it unlocked something. “I ended up discovering that I really liked it.”
She kept writing. At fourteen, they released a second book. “That’s my favorite one,” she says. “We really poured everything into it.” The act of writing helped her reflect, not just on what had happened, but how she was learning to move forward.
“It was maybe… therapeutic for me. I was able to process what I’d been through. And that was really healthy.”
Over time, storytelling became more than a personal outlet. It became her way of advocating — both for herself and for others. “It humanizes and normalizes disability and the people who have disabilities,” she says. And while she encourages others to share their experiences, she knows it’s not for everyone. “Putting yourself out there is scary… not everybody is up for that.” But even if no one else reads it, she adds, writing your story “just for you” still matters.
After graduating in 2024 with a degree in psychology and communication studies, Sarah Todd wasn’t sure where to go next. She wanted to keep working in disability inclusion, but those jobs are notoriously hard to find. Then, an internship listing on LinkedIn caught her attention, it offered the chance to work under a prominent leader in accessibility. “I figured I would just apply… and see what happens.”
She landed the role and began collaborating directly on developing disability inclusion strategies across the organization’s internal pillars — brand, culture, talent, and digital equity. The ideas weren’t just theoretical. Some, she implemented herself. When she noticed that a company cardigan, meant for employee wear, had buttons she couldn’t manage, she proposed a redesign. “I can’t do buttons,” she says. “I suggested it be made with magnets.” The company agreed, and the new fleece launched this year.
“It was kind of scary, having ownership over things,” she says of the internship. “But my supervisor trusted me. She wanted to empower me.”
That trust mattered. So did the experience. But like many internships, it came to an end. Now, Sarah Todd is focused on building her own projects: speaking engagements, consulting work, and her fourth book — her first solo. “We each want to do a young adult version of what we told in our books together,” she says. “That’s a goal of mine to really finish that book.”
Her storytelling, though, has already evolved, shaped not just by what she says, but how people respond. In high school, she wrote an essay called What You Don’t See , about how much invisible effort went into her daily life. “My friends didn’t see that my mom had helped me… they just saw me, just like them,” she says. At the time, she called her disability “invisible.” She doesn’t anymore.
“My disability is actually not invisible,” she says.
“I know how it affects me every day. I can’t get away from it. So it’s very visible to me.” Calling it invisible, she realized, was more about how others saw her — or didn’t. “Now I say I have a visible disability. Because I live with it.”
That visibility, however, isn’t always acknowledged. In college, friends would share things from class, lectures on spinal cord injuries, and when Sarah Todd tried to join the conversation, the room would go quiet. “I could just tell they had no clue what to say back,” she says. “It felt like they were slightly uncomfortable with it.” She doesn’t blame them. But she also doesn’t hide it. “There’s no stigma around it for me personally. I like talking about it.”
Access, too, can be hit or miss, especially when it’s more about branding than follow-through. She remembers a hotel stay with her longtime friend and co-author, who uses a wheelchair. The hotel had stairs at the entrance, no ramp, and a broken lift that looked like it hadn’t worked in months. “There was old wood in it and a sign that said, ‘Out of order. Sorry for the inconvenience,’” she says. Her friend had to enter through a steep ramp meant for cars. Inside, staff offered no help. “It was just a bad experience,” she says.
“Horrible accessibility, and then not getting help that we requested, that was really basic help.”
After the trip, Sarah Todd called the hotel pretending to be a potential guest and asked whether the building was accessible. “They were like, oh yeah, it’s accessible,” she says. “And I said, okay, so I’m able to get in and out of the hotel perfectly fine? And they were like, oh yeah, you can.” She didn’t push. But she didn’t forget, either.
Asked what real accessibility looks like to her, Sarah Todd is honest.
“We can never truly create a 100% accessible world for everybody,” she says. “There’s conflicting access needs. People are so unique.” But that doesn’t mean we give up. “It’s about being open to change, being flexible, being willing to adapt.”
Sometimes, she says, the most meaningful inclusion happens in one-on-one moments: when a coworker notices, when a friend asks, when someone listens. “Individual accessibility matters too.”
Disability, for Sarah Todd, is not a burden or a footnote. It’s simply part of her life and, in some ways, a source of connection and clarity. “I like to acknowledge that it’s very well-rounded,” she says. “There can be very cool things that come from being disabled.”
One of those things, at age 12, was a Make-A-Wish trip to meet One Direction. “I was obsessed with them,” she laughs. “And I remember feeling kind of weird about it afterwards, because I was so happy that I got to do this. But then I was like, if I didn’t have my disability, this wouldn’t have happened. And I’m supposed to not like the fact that I have a disability.”
She pauses. “Then I realized — no. It’s totally okay that some cool things come from a challenging experience.”
