[nabs-l] The Care and Feeding of Readers

[Darian Smith]

 Just ran across this article and thought it might be a good discussion starter.
 THE CARE AND FEEDING OF READERS
by Peggy Pinder
From the Editor: One of the most valuable professional skills a blind person can acquire and use effectively is managing readers. The ability to recruit, hire, supervise, and fire people providing this service is vital to virtually every blind person who hopes to succeed in school or employment. Recognizing this fact, the planners of the 1993 National Association of Blind Students Mid-Winter Conference asked Peggy Pinder (Second Vice President of the National Federation of the Blind, President of the NFB of Iowa, and an attorney in private practice) to pass on advice and opinions drawn from her experience during a number of years of working with readers to absorb huge amounts of information. It may surprise you, but it is sound and practical advice for those who must get the most out of every hour of reader time. Here is what she had to say:
I have been asked this afternoon to speak about what I have called in my own mind "the care and feeding of readers." It is an important topic for all blind people. I'll begin by defining accurately what we are talking about when we say that we as blind people are hiring a reader. We are not hiring someone to read. If that's what you think you are doing when you acquire a reader, then I think you are starting with the wrong premise. In fact, you are attempting to procure a method of acquiring information, how and when you want it. So the commodity you want is information in the package you define. 
Most of my remarks today will be directed toward the paid relationship because that is the ideal one. Someday you will be paying readers in connection with your job, and you should get practice doing the same thing while you are still a student. The vocational rehabilitation agency in your state should cover the cost of your readers while you are a student. When you hire this information-acquisition tool, you are clearly in need of something. In the contracted relationship you establish, the other party (the reader) also needs something. Your first job is to figure out what that is. 
When you can say, "I am the blind person, and I want information," and the other person says, "I am the reader, and I want money," the matter is very clear and tidy. It is possible to establish the contract with some other permutation if you wish, but this one is ideal, because it gives you what you most want-- control. When you go into a reader relationship, you must explicitly and implicitly establish that you are in control. Failing to do so is the biggest single mistake that people make in handling readers. They allow themselves to be convinced that the reader's feelings and needs and desires are the important ones in the relationship. If my reader wants to go to the bathroom, of course I'm going to let her go. I believe that it is important to be courteous to and considerate of people with whom you are interacting, but the reader does not make the determination about when and where and how fast and how long and what; you do. And if you don't go into a reader relationship with that firmly in mind, saying it explicitly and conducting yourself as though you believe it, you will let the reader determine the most valuable thing in the relationship--how much you are going to get out of it. 
This is true not only because you need a specified quantity of information packaged at a given rate, but because you must also learn how to hire, supervise, and fire readers. In college you can make all the mistakes and learn the techniques in a relatively painless situation. If you master all this by the time you get out into the working world, you will have a leg up on both your blind and sighted competition. The first advantage is that you will know how to get information. You will never be placed in a situation in which you can't get the data you need. Sometimes information is difficult or impossible to scan using today's technology. Most of the material I deal with, for example, can't be scanned. It's handwritten, and there's so much of it that I need to look at bits here and there. So the only efficient way to access it is through human readers. For you as for me, most of the material you will deal with for the rest of your life is likely to require live readers, not computers. A lot of technological development will have to take place over a number of years before this situation is likely to change much. 
So you need to learn how to interact with readers--find them, train them, and get rid of them. But you also have to learn that you can do it--not the Disabled Student Services Office, not Mom and Dad, not the itinerant teacher, not your roommate, not your boyfriend or girlfriend--nobody but you directs this very important part of your life: the management and acquisition of the information you need! If you come out of your degree program having mastered this skill, you are set for life with one of the most important techniques you will ever learn. Aside from the confidence you will acquire by knowing that, if you lose one reader, you can find two more, you will also be a skilled middle- manager. Your sighted contemporaries don't have to learn to manage their own time and that of others in determining how and when they are going to study. They pick up a book and begin to read. You have learned to deal with scheduling and control issues. If you have mastered the supervision of readers and are confident in your ability to do so, you can justify putting on your resume that you have middle-management skills. 
When the topic of obtaining readers comes up, most people don't even talk about the things I've been saying here. They say, "I can't get readers." Finding the readers you need is a full- time job until it is done. Every time you lose one, getting the replacement becomes a full-time job again. When I was in college, I got readers by putting up notices on all the dormitory bulletin boards. By the time I got them all up, I usually had more readers than I needed. When I went into the working world, I didn't have bulletin boards anymore, so I put ads in the newspaper. This method also yielded me more readers than I could ever use because with both techniques I swept so widely that I got plenty of opportunities to pick and choose among the candidates myself. I can absolutely guarantee you that, if you place a classified ad in the newspaper, you will have to put an answering machine on your phone line to notify people that you have already filled the position. People are out there looking for jobs or hoping to earn a little extra money. You want to find those people. Don't ever make the mistake of under-advertising for a reader. 
Personally, I would never take a list from a disabled students services office or anywhere else. I want my readers to know that I am the one who found them, that I outline the job, and that I am the one with whom they have to deal. Not only is it easier to control the situation if the reader needs the cash, but it is a lot easier if he or she is your age or younger. I don't find it easy to control readers older than I, and I never have. I'm sure that is a pretty common phenomenon. There are undoubtedly glorious exceptions, but probably not many, particularly since younger people tend to be the ones who need the most money. 
As you can tell, I have never had trouble finding candidates for my reading jobs. I begin by telling them what I want, and I assess their reactions to what I have said. I usually give readers a test; I hand them something to read. Almost no one does a good job of reading that first time. I am more interested in assessing their reactions to being given the book, to being told to stop and go to another page. I am assessing their basic reactions to the constraints of the reading discipline, their interest in the money, and their responses to the little speech I make them. I have developed it over the years, and it covers the things that most people are daunted by and the errors that most people make when they read to a blind person. 
I tell them that I am not looking for someone to give me a dramatic reading; if I want that, I'll buy a ticket to a play. I do not want people to worry about their inflection. In fact, the best readers I have ever had are those who read in almost a monotone, because that is the fastest way for the human body to emit information. It is true that a good speaker of English automatically inflects at punctuation. You can't stop yourself from doing it a little. I tell readers not to worry about making sure to read expressively. Don't give me drama; give me data, as fast as you can get it out. My fastest readers have learned that they can read almost without moving their lips. 
I often cite the example of the guy I had as a reader when I was a prosecutor. When he was reading to me, people would come to the door and stand there laughing. They would say to me, "You can't understand him," and to him, "You're not even reading." I just shut the door because he and I were perfectly happy; he was reading as fast as he could, and I was listening as fast as I could, and it suited both of us. He also had learned--as have all my best readers--what I tell all of them to learn: the technique of reading without having a clue about what they are saying. I tell readers this because, if they know that it is a good idea, they will develop the technique faster, and if I don't tell them, it will upset them when it happens. I also tell my readers that it is impossible for them to read too fast for me. When I read a recorded book, I automatically double the playback rate. If you can't understand books at a very fast speed, you should practice doing so, because it is an invaluable skill for students or working people who have lots of material to get through. 
I also tell readers that I have heard every English word and many foreign ones as well pronounced in every possible way. I don't care if they don't know how to say the word correctly. If it occurs frequently, I'll tell the reader how to pronounce it because the mispronunciation will irritate both of us. But by and large I really don't care how they pronounce the word if they will just get it out. If they are really too afraid to take a stab at it, I tell them to spell it and go on.
With that little speech I pretty well get very good, very efficient reading right from the start because I have touched on everything readers are most afraid of. And I have told them what my parameters are. Later on, if I have to say that a passage is too dense for them to take at speed, they can slow down. It is much harder to try to speed up a reader who has been used to reading for you at a slow speed. Set your readers at a fast rate first, and slow them down when you need to. 
I have a few comments about specialized reading. I will take just about anybody as a reader, if he or she can speak the language. I would say that if you are taking a foreign language course, you do need a reader with that specialized knowledge. But in chemistry, mathematics, or symbolic logic, for example, you can train almost any accurate reader who shows up on time to deal with the special symbols. Yes, there is specialized knowledge involved in reading such subjects, but don't assume that you can't do the teaching. After all, you need to know what those symbols mean. If you don't, you have to get the first reader you have scheduled for the course to take the time to describe them to you. You cannot afford to hire readers who already know the symbols and take the attitude that you don't need to know what they look like because the reader will take care of that part. Your response to that attitude must be, "No, you won't. I'm paying you to provide me with the information I want, and that includes the symbols." Don't ever fall into the trap of hiring a knowledgeable reader in a particular subject who then becomes your tutor as part of the reading responsibility. You are not hiring for that function. If you need a tutor, hire one. Your reader must always know that you are in charge: When I say skim, you skim; when I say skip, you skip. Don't put up with pauses or with comments like "Wait, this looks interesting." The other thing you have to make clear is that you expect your readers to read everything on the page unless you tell them to omit it. I am certain that, if you lay down the guidelines I have just described, you will have competent readers. 
It is your job to schedule your readers in such a way that you will always be able to get the assignments done. This may mean that you will have to find some readers who can be flexible and some who can allow you to increase the time on short notice. You may need to establish the policy with some readers that you can cancel an appointment at short notice. You should structure things in such a way that, when you finish a class, you can sit down and use the time following with a reader. You don't want to have to go to an employer someday and admit that "my reader was sick yesterday, so I lost that hundred-thousand-dollar contract because I wasn't able to read the material." In other words, part of mastering this management skill is learning to do multi- layered scheduling with the option to cancel and scheduling sufficient reader time with the option to increase the hours if necessary. You never want to admit to a professor that you couldn't complete an assignment because you didn't have a reader. That is not a valid excuse. 
If a reader is not working out for whatever reason, you will know it right away. Remember, you are not locked into keeping him or her; let such readers go. Never mind that you like the person; fire him anyway. You can go out and have beers with him, marry him, or do anything else you want with him, but don't keep him as a reader! You have no responsibility to be nice to that person; your job is to get information out of him. If you want to socialize, do it in some other context, but do not ever fall into the trap of thinking that you have to keep a reader because his or her feelings would be hurt if you severed the reading relationship. Your job is to get rid of poor readers and do it in a civil and humane enough way that you can keep them as friends if that's what you want to do. 
All that I have said is true in some sense of volunteer readers as well, but the difference is that they are being paid in a form that is not the coin of the realm. Long-term volunteer readers are either motivated by an impulse to be nice to a blind person or fulfilling some requirement imposed by a church or social organization. Either way, they are not responding to you and the money you control. If you are absolutely compelled to use volunteer readers, you must figure out what their motivation is and find a way to turn it toward yourself in order to establish personal commitment and response to you. It is still true that everything I have said about paid readers is also necessary in your relationship with a volunteer reader. Volunteers must read everything on the page, respond to your directions, and get the words out as fast as possible. And, if they don't, you have to fire them too. 
There you have what I know about readers and the way to establish a good working-relationship with them, delivered as quickly and concisely as I know how to say it.