Here are the most famous people with disabilities, as worked out by counting the page views on all Wikipedia articles that are both biographies and disability related.

Rank Article Daily Average Views
1 Stephen Hawking 23,624
2 Franklin D. Roosevelt 17,484
3 Frida Kahlo 10,327
4 Oscar Pistorius 10,167
5 Helen Keller 9,290
6 Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon 6,474
7 Christopher Reeve 5,987
8 Daryl Hannah 3,685
9 Howie Mandel 2,672
10 Tammy Duckworth 2,409
11 RJ Mitte 2,259
12 Joseph Merrick 1,987
13 Robert Kubica 1,571
14 Ian Dury 1,363
15 Nick Vujicic 1,313
16 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 1,305
17 Barbara Gordon 1,304
18 Chinua Achebe 1,188
19 Rick Allen (drummer) 1,019

It’s an interesting list – Frida Kahlo was a painter who happened to have one leg. Barbara Gordon is interesting, because, of course, she’s fictional (the former Batgirl). But we’re also missing such ones as Roosevelt, Lord Nelson, and Ludwig van Beethoven. I suspect it’s actually that their articles haven’t been tagged by Wikipedia as being disability-related.

I think it is interesting to maintain (the first version of this article is from 2013) and it’s also interesting to distinguish between ‘people whose fame is tied to a disability’ and ‘people who are famously disabled’ and finally ‘people whose disability isn’t in the first five facts you know about them’.

For more fun info on Wikipedia, and if you’ve ever wondered how it gets edited in practice, please reduce my bounce rate and check out my series on Wikipedia editing.

People interested in this work might also be interested my work mapping NHS areas to MP’s constituencies, my work with improving the accessibility with the Royal Society of Chemistry, my presentations on speech disability and the charity I run