Keith Armstrong (1950-2017), typewriter poet and disability campaigner, was born in South Africa in 1950. Keith contracted polio when he was six months old, thereby becoming a wheelchair user from a young age. After his diagnosis, his mother returned with the family to the UK (his father, who was from South Africa, had died shortly before Keith's birth in a car accident). Keith first attended Ormerod School in Oxford before moving to Hephaistos School in Berkshire. In 1967, he became a student at the National Star Centre for Disabled Youth in Cheltenham. Aged 16, he founded and co-edited his own poetry magazine, The Informer, which ran until c.1971 producing nine issues in total.

Keith moved to London in 1972, aged 22, and experienced a period of homelessness before he acquired a council flat in Ealing. In 1979, he helped found the Liberation Network of People with Disabilities. In the 1980s and 1990s, he became a committed adviser, consultant, and campaigner for promoting accessible public transport for people with disabilities. He was arrested for blocking New Oxford Street during one protest but the case was thrown out of court as the courtroom lacked ramp access for defendants using wheelchairs. His work with the Disabled People’s Direct Action Network (DAN) in the 1990s and 2000s led to improvements in train and tube access, as well as the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995.

Influenced by the Benedictine priest, theologian, and concrete poet Dom Sylvester Houedard (1924-1992), examples of Armstrong's typewriter art can be found in Barrie Tullet, Typewriter Art: A Modern Anthology (2014) and Marvin and Ruth Sackner, The Art of Typewriting (2015). Keith died of cancer in May 2017.