[blindlaw] decreasing reliance on readers as proofers

Sat Nov 12 19:45:28 UTC 2016

Laura:

Excellent idea. In my practice, I can draft a document and be about 90 
percent confident that it is well-formatted by using a few tricks I also 
learned from an administrative assistant a few years ago. As oppose to 
asking her to correct my errors, we sat down and she told me the most common 
formatting errors that she had to fix in my documents that JAWS was not 
picking up on. I now follow a specific routine to finalize my drafts, even 
though  they might be error-free to a sighted person. That gives me a chance 
to fix some of the more obvious errors before final inspection by someone 
who's sighted. Notwithstanding this level of confidence, I would not file or 
submit a final document to the court or a professional colleague without 
first having it inspected by a sighted person. There are some funny things 
that Microsoft does on occasions that can only be observed with a pair of 
eyes.

Rod Alcidonis, Esq.

-----Original Message----- 
From: Laura Wolk via BlindLaw
Sent: Saturday, November 12, 2016 2:02 PM
To: Blind Law Mailing List
Cc: Laura Wolk
Subject: [blindlaw] decreasing reliance on readers as proofers

This message is in response to Patti's observation that blind students
and attorneys sometimes rely too much on their readers, an observation
with which I generally agree.

But I don't think this is the entire problem.  i think, in large part,
blind people don't even know what questions to ask, because it is hard
to know what errors are out there unless someone thinks to tell you.
I have been inordinately blessed by friends who have given me tips and
tricks both on style and also on mechanics about which I was utterly
clueless.  Things like the fact that if you copy and paste directly
from Westlaw, your quotation marks and apostrophes will look different
than those that arise when typing directly into word. Or, if typing a
single-spaced document with footnotes, it may behoove you to put a
blank line between the footnotes for ease of a sighted person's
reading smaller text.  or that global format changes such as
justifying text "above the line" do not transfer to your footnotes,
resulting in your footnotes remaining unjustified.  Or how you can
connect a heading with the first line immediately following it to
ensure that your headings are never on one page with the accompanying
text on the next page.  These are all things about which I had no
intuitive knowledge as a completely blind person.  Without having been
told, I would never even have known to ask the question, and would
have continued turning in documents with quite obvious errors that
even proofing with braille would not have caught.

I think it would be beneficial for these purposes for the NFb lawyers
division to compile a list of similar formatting issues, perhaps in a
wiki-type format so that everyone could contribute.  Of course, some
of these things come down to stylistic preference, but many of them
don't.  Has anyone else ever thought of this?

Laura

On 11/11/16, Chang, Patti via BlindLaw <blindlaw at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> I think the bigger question here is what should you be doing. If you rely
> too much on your readers for proofing then you do not become a really good
> proofer   for yourself. We should all use Proof readers in the final
> instance to catch visual things we miss but I see too many students were
> lying to heavily on their proofers.
>
>
>
> "Every day we raise the expectations of blind people in the National
> Federation of the Blind."
>
> Patti S.  Gregory Chang Esq.
> Director of Outreach
> National Federation of the Blind
> Direct phone: (410) 659-9314 extension 2422
> Mobile: (773) 307-6440
> WWW.NFB.org<http://WWW.NFB.org>
>
> On Nov 11, 2016, at 8:57 PM, Aimee Harwood via BlindLaw
> <blindlaw at nfbnet.org<mailto:blindlaw at nfbnet.org>> wrote:
>
> Greetings everyone,
>
> I am getting a reader who is paid by the state.  This reader will perform
> reading of any material for school purposes that I need them to read. 
> They
> will also proof any assignments before I hand them in.  I will use them
> during research to help locate something on the screen that is hard to
> locate it is too time consuming to navigate to just to get that one bit of
> info. Basically the individual will assist with anything vision related.
>
> My school assigns a judicial opinion the first semester of the 1L year. 
> All
> graded assignments have restrictions on students getting outside 
> assistance.
> We are not allowed to let anyone see our work or assist us in any way
> regarding the assignment including research. If a student violates any of
> the restrictions, they violate the honor code.
>
> Now that you have the basic situation, can the school penalize me for 
> using
> a reader to assist me in any visual aspect of the assignment? If I use the
> reader to verify the formatting or point out any issues they see that I 
> may
> have missed because I didn't see it?  What about penalizing me for using 
> the
> reader to assist in research to find what I ask them to find  or highlight
> what I ask them to highlight? Basically, can they penalize me for the 
> reader
> performing non-essential tasks on graded assignments?  How much control 
> does
> the school have over the person paid by the state to assist with outside 
> of
> class activities as long as I am the one doing the legal work?
>
>
>
> Aimee
>
> Sent from my iPhone
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