[NAGDU] Readers and Public Libraries, Offtopic for Some

[Heather Bird]

         As to what to pay readers. I know that it is difficult, when it 
depends on how much money you have to spend. If for instance you are 
living on SSI or SSDI, then coughing up a lot of money for a reader is 
really going to hurt financially. I would recommend, just out of human 
decency to pay minimum wage, well, as a minimum. Beyond that, I would 
say that best practice is to pay between $10 and $20 an hour, depending 
on the cost of living in your area and the expertise of the reader. 
There is a world of difference in quality and pay rate, between a  
random teenager who is reading exactly what the paper says, who when 
asked about color identification can only give you "Its blue, just a 
dark blue." and a skilled individual who can read you the sender of a 
piece of mail, then upon your request can skip through and find the 
relevant asked for section, who will describe a color as "Its a dark 
blue, not navy, a little lighter, like a royal blue." You would pay the 
less experienced reader around $10 and the more experienced helpful 
reader closer to $20. To keep your costs down, it is worth paying an 
efficient reader more, who can zip efficiently through tasks without 
cutting corners or missing crucial information. It is also helpful if 
you have everything ready to go. If you want your mail read, a pile of 
shirts checked in order to spot treat them with stain remover, and you 
want the ingredients read on three boxes of cake mix, then have the mail 
out in a basket on the coffee table, with the three boxes of cake mix 
sitting beside them, and the pile of shirts on the arm of the couch 
right next to the coffee table, with a bottle of stain fighter standing 
by. This will help you to spend less time, and less money. Obviously 
reducing the amount of things a reader needs to help you with will cut 
costs too. For instance, if you can use KNFB reader on your iPhone or a 
scanner and OCR software to make sense of as much of your mail as 
possible, to at least figure out what something is, even if you can't 
read the whole thing this will help you to organize things. If you have 
a sister who you don't want to judge your personal life and see your 
mail, but she can check clothing for stains, then have her do that 
in-person or over Face Time or Skype, then you don't have to pay for 
reader time to accomplish that particular task. If you have a volunteer 
who is a really sweet teenager or an elderly person who cannot read 
well, or who reads so slowly that you want to start screaming like a 
crazy person, then have that person help you with things like sorting 
pantry ingredients and labeling them, or sorting and identifying craft 
supplies or clothing by color, and use your reader only for harder 
reading tasks. Make sure to have any reader sign a non-disclosure 
privacy statement as they will be seeing things like credit card offers, 
bank statements, personal letters, etc. If you can get a background 
check, it is well worth your time as well. I hope that helps.


On 6/7/2017 1:55 PM, Danielle Delete via NAGDU wrote:
> Hello Groups,
>
> How much dou you all pay your readers? Also, I read somewhere a long
> time ago that every city is supposed to have one accessible computer
> at the public library equipped with JAWS and hooked up to a printer.
> However, none of the 3 libraries have these features in the city I
> live in. How does one institute this or facilitate it?
>
>
> h