[blindlaw] Seeking Sighted Assistance for Reading Documents

[Singh, Nandini]

I work at a large firm and still use human readers, who are usually one of my two secretaries (two secretaries serve about 10-12 attorneys). Use of a human reader is a matter of efficiency for me, the firm, and the client. My secretaries most often read small administrative documents that are not worth OCR-ing, handwritten documents, some date and signature lines, and any sort of online form that has graphical elements.

Much like Angie, I also task my secretaries and our document support services personnel to check my formatting and, when necessary, to apply the firm styles for formal documents. I do feel like I have a strong command of the JAWS keystrokes to perform formatting steps independently, but I appreciate having a visual once-over to correct anything I might have missed or to improve general spacing and alignment aesthetics that would not always strike me.

Our document support services people can also retype handwritten documents into Word documents. I had to do this for a pro bono case where the other side was a pro se plaintiff.

The other place where I use readers relates to accessing our Ediscovery platform. This is inaccessible using JAWS, so I often locate a paralegal or a litigation support services personnel (usually assigned to the matter) to run document searches that I supply them. Once I understand the number of hits of each search, communicated through email, I ask the paralegal or LSS tech to print the documents as PDFs and save them to my working folder.

I have not worked at my firm long, but I know the attorneys here have a range of working styles and habits. Some of the more old school types even request a secretary to dial the number at the start of conference calls! I have not perceived that my requests of secretaries, paralegals, and other support staff are out of the ordinary. All that being said, my firm has a ton of resources, and I am grateful that I can make use of all of them. Hope this helps.

Regards,
Nikki

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindLaw [mailto:blindlaw-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Rahul Bajaj via BlindLaw
Sent: Saturday, August 5, 2017 7:28 AM
To: blindlaw at nfbnet.org
Cc: Rahul Bajaj
Subject: [blindlaw] Seeking Sighted Assistance for Reading Documents

Hi Everyone,

I hope this message finds you well. While I am able to read most
documents independently after converting them into an accessible
format, I have to rely on sighted assistance from time to time.
This is obviously the case when handwritten documents are involved,
but also when the quality of the converted documents is not so good as
to enable me to decipher some pieces of information such as dates of
events or the page numbers of the written submissions on which the
annexures I need can be found.
In this respect, I was wondering if any of you could comment on: (1)
the principles that you adopt to decide when you want to rely on a
sighted reader as opposed to using assistive technology; and (2) for
those of you who work in a law firm, have you formally asked the firm
to make someone available to you for this purpose, or does this work
on an ad hoc basis?
Further, is your sighted reader generally an intern, a secretary or
someone else?

Best,
Rahul

_______________________________________________
BlindLaw mailing list
BlindLaw at nfbnet.org
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindlaw_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for BlindLaw:
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindlaw_nfbnet.org/nsingh%40cov.com