[blindLaw] Legal software accessibility

[Graham Hardy]

Dear colleagues,

 

My firm is contemplating changing legal management software to either Clio or Leap. I’m writing in hopes of any feedback as to their accessibility with JAWS. I would invite responses specific to the workflow I’ll describe, but I’d appreciate any level of detail in a response. It would be most helpful, though, when saying something is or isn’t accessible, to explain what it’s like, which I’ll attempt to do in my descriptions below to give you a good idea of what I’m looking for.

 

Currently, we have Amicus Attorney for time tracking, calendars, tasks, etc. I’ve been able to get consistent results with time tracking although the interface is somewhat quirky, but I long ago gave up on working with the calendar in Amicus and just use Outlook. Amicus appears to be built with Windows Forms. It uses nonstandard controls for tables, so, for example, when I arrow up and down JAWS will report the row number but I have to do a Say Line to hear its contents. There are a lot of unlabelled controls that read as “Button” or “Edit”, and you have to memorise the order of controls, which is made more complicated by the fact that Tab and Shift+Tab take me through controls in a slightly different order. The calendar is not impossible to use, but I have to use the JAWS cursor a lot and deal with windows that seem to be on top of each other. I can work around the issues with the calendar by granting other people in my office access to my Outlook calendar, but, of course, I still can’t see other people’s calendars, which is the point of having a firm-wide calendar.

 

For document management, we use Worldox. This stores all documents in directories by document number underneath a directory for each legal file. One nice thing about this approach is that I can get ahold of the original directory and collect all the PDF files to batch-process in FineReader, and, even if they’re named by their document number, I can still index them based on the document numbers that show up in the database. Worldox appears to be installed on each workstation and fetches its data from the local network. The program is, again, quirky in a few ways. Although it uses a standard list box to browse files, there are issues with highlighting being detected by JAWS, which frequently reports “No selected item” when I arrow up and down but, when I route the JAWS cursor to the current line, it can read the text that way. It also loves rendering ligature characters, so, for example, using the ligature for “fi”, it reads out “Modified” instead of “Modified”. Selecting files is somehow independent of the cursor movement in a way that feels non-native to Windows. However, at the end of the day, if I need to, I can export the list of files as CSV data and browse it in Excel and find the path for the original file as stored on the network to open manually, if I have to. And needless to say, files are edited in Word, Excel, or whatever the associated program is.

 

All this to say, I’ve gotten used to these programs over the years and come up with a workable workflow even if it’s different from what others in my office would likely have. I can often end up going through thousands of pages to prepare for a proceeding, so I really do care about efficiency what with the user interface for navigating amongst documents and running them several at a time through OCR.

 

As I say, any feedback would be helpful.

 

Graham