[blindlaw] Accessibility of Lexis-Nexis

[denise avant]

hi,
I am an Assistant Public Defender here in Chicago, and our office has had an exclusive contract with Lexis for several years now. The best way to handle lexis with jaws is to become familiar with the various screens, then use your links, headers, find command  and form field command in jaws to move around the screen. There is no text version of lexis. at one time, lexis did employ a blind attorney, who was also a jaws user. I cannot remember his name, but if the company has a lexis rep or trainer, perhaps they can put you in touch with him. when my office first started using lexis, the trainer came to the office, and sat down with me and since i knew the jaws commands, she trained me on the lexis stuff. we were then able to figure out different ways to move about the page. The training was included in our contract. and if you have questions i'm willing to try to help you.


--- On Thu, 3/17/11, Matthias L. Niska <mlniska04 at yahoo.com> wrote:


From: Matthias L. Niska <mlniska04 at yahoo.com>
Subject: [blindlaw] Accessibility of Lexis-Nexis
To: blindlaw at nfbnet.org
Date: Thursday, March 17, 2011, 12:31 PM


Hello all,

Matthias Niska here, I am just finishing up my second year at the University of Minnesota Law School, and some of you may remember me as a NFB Scholarship winner from the summer of 2009. I'm new to this listserv, and I have a legal research question I was hoping you all might help me with. 

I am a JAWS user, and was extremely frustrated at the beginning of law school with the poor interaction between JAWS and the standard versions of both Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis. However, shortly into my 1L year, thanks to Patti Chang, I found out about the text version of Westlaw, and that has worked great for my legal research needs ever since. I've been able to use Westlaw text for all of my law school research, and also for my job last summer at the U.S. Attorney's Office here in Minneapolis.

My problem is that I was lucky to land a job with a great Minneapolis firm this summer, but they have an exclusive contractual relationship with Lexis-Nexis. I have explained my concerns to the folks at my firm and they are prepared to give me any and all reasonable accommodations that I need to be successful this summer, but obviously because of the contract with Lexis-Nexis, they would strongly prefer that I learn to use Lexis if at all possible.

Which brings us to my question: Do any of you JAWS users out there use Lexis for your legal research? Is there some text-based version of Lexis out there I don't know about? Any tricks or advice you would suggest to make Lexis more compatible with my screen-reader, or people I should contact?

Thanks much,

Matthias Niska
J.D. candidate, 2012
University of Minnesota Law School

 




      
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