Question:  The Miracle worker is based on this person who was the first blind and deaf person to earn a degree in what?

Context articles: Mindy Jacobsen
Heidi Zimmer
Claudia L. Gordon
Helen Keller
The Miracle Worker (2000 film)
Nellie Zabel Willhite
National Theatre of the Deaf
Simultaneous communication
Richard Aslatt Pearce
Rennellese Sign Language

Mindy Jacobsen is the first blind woman to be ordained as a hazzan (also called a cantor) in the history of Judaism; she was ordained in 1978 by Hebrew Union College.
 She has been blind since birth as a result of retinopathy of prematurity, and was one of the first group of blind children to attend public school in Miami; she was also the first blind member of her local SING OUT cast (a branch of Up with People), and later founded a cast in Tallahassee, Florida.
 She is the First Vice President of the National Federation of the Blind of New York.
Heidi Zimmer is an American deaf mountaineer who has accomplished several notable firsts in mountaineering.
 She was born deaf, and became the first deaf woman in history to reach the top of Mt. McKinley on June 13, 1991.
 At the top, she unfolded a banner reading "DEAF WOMAN, A PARADE THROUGH THE DECADES".
 On August 15th, 1992, Zimmer became the first deaf person to summit Mt. Elbrus.
 On September 22nd, 1994, Zimmer became the first deaf woman to summit Mt. Kilimanjaro.
 She has also won a bronze medal in the Deaf Olympics.
 She graduated from Gallaudet University in 1978.
Claudia L. Gordon is the first deaf Black female attorney in the United States.
 She currently works in the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs.
 Previously she held a position in the White House Office of Public Engagement as the Public Engagement Advisor to the Disability Community for less than a year.
 She is also the first deaf person to work at the White House in an detailee capacity.
 In an interview she makes a point that there was a deaf intern working in the White House before her, and that there are currently other deaf people working in less prestigious positions in the White House.
Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, political activist, and lecturer.
 She was the first deaf-blind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree.
 The story of how Keller's teacher, Anne Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become widely known through the dramatic depictions of the play and film "The Miracle Worker".
 Her birthplace in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, is now a museum and sponsors an annual "Helen Keller Day".
 Her birthday on June 27 is commemorated as Helen Keller Day in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and was authorized at the federal level by presidential proclamation by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, the 100th anniversary of her birth.
The Miracle Worker is a 2000 biographical television film based on the 1959 play of the same title by William Gibson, which originated as a 1957 broadcast of the television anthology series "Playhouse 90".
 Gibson's original source material was "The Story of My Life", the 1902 autobiography of Helen Keller.
 The play was adapted for the screen twice before, in 1962 and 1979.
 The film is based on the life of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan's struggles to teach her.
Eleanor "Nellie" Zabel Willhite (Born November 22, 1892 in Box Elder, South Dakota – September 2,1991) was the first deaf woman to earn a pilot’s license, as well as South Dakota’s first female pilot.
 Willhite became deaf at age two due to measles.
 She earned her pilot's license in 1928.
 She was a founding member of the Ninety-Nines, an organization which was founded in 1929 with 99 female pilots as founding members, and is dedicated to the advancement of aviation and support for women in aviation.
 Willhite started the first South Dakota chapter of the Ninety-Nines in 1941.
 She worked as a commercial pilot until 1944 (the first and last deaf person to do so), carrying airmail.
 She also worked as a barnstormer, specializing in flour bombing and balloon racing.
 She was inducted into the South Dakota Aviation Hall of Fame shortly before her death in 1991, and her plane the "Pard" is now on display at the Southern Museum of Flight in Birmingham, Alabama.
The National Theatre of the Deaf (NTD) is the oldest theatre company in the United States that has continually gone on tours and produced original works.
 The company has visited each of the 50 states in close to 80 national tours, as well as many countries in over 30 international tours.
 It was founded in 1967 after psychologist Dr. Edna Simon Levine, set designer avid Hays, and Broadway's director Arthur Penn and actress Anne Bancroft of "The Miracle Worker" began planning and fundraising in the 1950s.
 Start-up costs were funded by federal grants, and the company held its first performance at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
 In 1968, the Little Theatre of the Deaf was founded to produce shows for a younger-aged audience.
 The Little Theatre of the Deaf is also still producing and touring today.
 Productions combine the use of American Sign Language with the spoken word, in accordance with the theatre's mission statement to educate the general public about Deaf art and link Deaf and hearing communities.
 In 1994, the National and Worldwide Deaf Theatre Conference had its first meeting, in which global Deaf playwrights and actors gathered to hold discussions, critiques, and celebrations of Deaf theatre.
 The precedence and support of the National Theatre of the Deaf is considered instrumental in the founding and collaboration of a Deaf theatre community worldwide.
 The National Theatre of the Deaf has won several awards, including the Tony Award for Theatrical Excellence.
 Ex-NTD actress Phyllis Frelich won the 1980 Best Actress Tony Award for "Children of a Lesser God" produced by The Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.
 Linda Bove, a regular on the television series "Sesame Street", also acted with NTD.
 Other famous actors who have worked with NTD include NTD co-founder Bernard Bragg, Colleen Dewhurst, Sir Michael Redgrave, Chita Rivera, Jason Robards and Meryl Streep.
 Today, the Theatre is located on the campus of the American School of the Deaf in West Hartford, Connecticut.
 The theatre still goes on tour, produces and adapts stage works, and is expanding into a few teleplay features on public television to continue to create new opportunities and audiences for Deaf theater.
Simultaneous communication, SimCom, or sign supported speech (SSS) is a technique sometimes used by deaf, hard-of-hearing or hearing sign language users in which both a spoken language and a manual variant of that language (such as English and manually coded English) are used simultaneously.
 While the idea of communicating using two modes of language seems ideal in a hearing/deaf setting, in practice the two languages are rarely relayed perfectly.
 Often the native language of the user (usually spoken language for the hearing person and sign language for the deaf person) is the language that is strongest, while the non-native language degrades in clarity.
 In an educational environment this is particularly difficult for deaf children as a majority of teachers who teach the deaf are hearing.
 Results from surveys taken indicate that communication for students is indeed signing (about 2/3 of the population of students), and that the signing leans more toward English rather than ASL.
Reverend Richard Aslatt Pearce (1855–1928) was the first deaf person to be ordained as an Anglican clergyman.
 He was educated via the sign language of his era, he became Chaplain to the Deaf and Dumb, and he fulfilled this duty in the Southampton area for the rest of his life.
 In 1885 he was introduced to Queen Victoria, who then ordered the "Royal Commission on the Blind, the Deaf and Dumb and Others of the United Kingdom", 1889.
Rennellese Sign Language is an extinct form of home sign documented from Rennell Island in 1974.
 It was developed about 1915 by a deaf person named Kagobai and used by his hearing family and friends, but apparently died with him; he was the only deaf person on the island, and there never was an established, self-replicating community of signers.
 Accordingly, in January 2017 its ISO 639-3 code [rsi] was retired.