[blindlaw] Internship Problem

[Rahul Bajaj]

Hi All,

I am scheduled to intern in an intellectual property firm next
January. Even though I haven't discussed the modalities with them yet,
a friend of mine who has interned there before told me that they are
averse to the idea of allowing their interns to use their own machines
due to privacy concerns and ask their visually impaired interns to
install a copy of the screen reading software of his/her choice on the
firm's computers. Here in India, most people do not use original
copies of screen reading software because they're ridiculously
expensive and beyond their economic capacity. As a result, most of us
buy pirated versions of software like JAWS from organizations that
sell them because there's no other way to perform any substantive or
concrete task on a computer. Now, since the firm that I'm planning on
interning at is an IP firm, they do not allow interns to install
pirated copies of screen reading software on their machines. At the
same time, they're not willing to purchase an original copy of the
software for me just for the sake of a 4-week internship. One possible
solution could be to use an open source software like NVDA, but I
don't think it would be feasible for me to acquire a nuanced
understanding of NVDA in such a short span of time since I have never
used it before or that it would allow me to use some advanced features
as efficaciously as JAWS.
So, I'd love to know your views/ suggestions for grappling with this
challenge. I want to be able to chalk out a clear solution before
discussing this problem with the firm.

Best,
Rahul