[NAGDU] Readers and Public Libraries, Offtopic for Some

[Star Gazer]

				Yes, all this. 
Danielle, what skill sets are you looking for? To put another way, what
goals are you trying to accomplish?

-----Original Message-----
From: NAGDU [mailto:nagdu-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Heather Bird via
NAGDU
Sent: Wednesday, June 7, 2017 2:31 PM
To: Danielle Ledet via NAGDU <nagdu at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Heather Bird <heather.l.bird at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [NAGDU] Readers and Public Libraries, Offtopic for Some

         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

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