[blindLaw] Current or recent law school experience

[Maura Kutnyak]

Hi Brian,

I suspect that the best means to increasing a persons speed with reading, understanding, and navigating legal textbooks is a combination of practice and flexibility. And for Blind law students, you can add the need for knowledge of assistive tech, plus strong assistive technical support.

I graduated from law school in May 23. My techniques evolved a lot from day- one to the end. One approach I took was to gradually increase JAWS’s speaking rate a little bit overtime. That allowed me to acclimate to the increasing speed naturally and with ease. I turned it up maybe once every couple of months and that worked well.

In addition to JAWS, I used Kindle and sometimes adobe to read books. The format of the book, and software that I used to interface with it, largely depended on the publishers, how they made the books available, and the length of the book.

My favorite method was to convert PDFs to Word. That wasn’t always possible because many of the Law school texts were too long. But it was great when I could do that. That would allow me to take notes directly in the body of the book, and Use headings as place markers. In Word, you can make a list of all the headings, by pressing insert F6 inward while using jaws, and quickly jump around. I often would make case names  into a heading. I would also copy and paste quotes from the cases I was reading for a given class into my outline , which was really nice for studying/prepping for exams. 

When  time was really tight, I would skip the meandering reasoning and focus on understanding the rule, the procedural history, and other essential elements of the case. That got easier with practice.  the cases you’ll read are authored by a variety of judges, and therefore adhere to a variety of styles, There are consistent cues You can use to find what you need more quickly.

Take good care.
Warmly,

Maura Kutnyak Esq.
716-563-9882

> On Jul 6, 2024, at 11:22 PM, omar duncan via BlindLaw <blindlaw at nfbnet.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi based on current or previous law  school experience
> 
> When it comes to reading and scrolling through loads and loads of dense
> reading on cases that you have discussions about in class, what  is the
> fastest text to speech method to go
> About that?
> 
> 
> Is kurzweil 1000 or 3000 or open book used by you all.
> 
> Or using jaws or zoomtext  and uploading the reading material on FS reader
> to be read through daisy files?
> 
> 
> Or do you guys load the reading and books on a pdf software like Adobe  or
> some other reading system provided by these visually impaired softwares to
> read and have it be read to you?
> 
> Or do you all use a combination of some vision with text speech AS A
> COMBINATION like text to speech with a CCTV?
> 
> Thanks,
> Brian
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