[blindkid] Readers in Middle & High School

[Allison Hilliker]

Hello,

Melissa gave some great info. I won't restate her ideas, I'll just add in my experience if it helps.

I'm sorry to say that it may be an up-hill battle getting schools or voc rehab agencies to fund reader experience for middle and high schoolers. The thinking of most professionals, and many blind people for that matter, is that human reader use is a dying art these days. This isn't a perspective that I agree with personally, but it seems to be the prevailing mindset. 

When I was in college in Michigan in the early 2000s, I had to do a lot of advocacy with voc rehab in my state to get funding for readers. And that was for actual college use, not for training. In theory, obtaining reader funding could be easier today than it was then, but since there is actually a good deal more reading material available electronically now, I imagine human reader funding has gotten harder to obtain recently, not easier. 

Since I'm not the parent of a teen, I can't speak to the experience of obtaining readers for that age group. I can give you some current reader info however. My fiancé and I are both blind and are in the process of hiring a new human reader and are offering $15 per hour for 4 hours a week. This sounds reasonable to us, but even so we've had at least 3 great applicants ask for $20. We may increase the rate at some point, but it looks like we've found someone good at the $15so we're going to try that out first. We're not convinced that reading should merit $20. We may be proved wrong by life experience yet though we'll see. We live in AZ, rates in other states may be higher or lower based on local cost of living. 

When I asked on another NFBnet list last month, Young Professionals, for info  about current pay rates for human readers and sources for finding them, I got very little concrete info. I found that, the only folks who had genuine practical experience-based recommendations were all significantly older than me. That leads me to wonder what other 30 something blind individuals are doing for reading printed info these days because apparently it's not using human readers. That boggles my mind because my fiancé and I are both avid assistive tech users who both work in the technical support field. So I can't imagine that every other blind person has more non-human solutions for print management than us, but perhaps they do. My guess is that few people in my age range received education about how to hire and manage readers when they were in school, so the result is a generation of folks who tend not to hire humans for reading. 

So then are readers still relevant? I think so. Has anyone tried reading a medical bill with OCR recently? It's awful! And it amazes me how, with all the technology available in this world, there are still so many printed forms that are required to be filled out or signed by hand. And speaking of handwriting, it still can't be read by OCR, and there's a good deal of that that comes across my desk today. And my most recent apartment lease came to me in an inaccessible electronic web form that couldn't be downloaded for OCRing. And CAPTCHAs, oh the CAPTCHAs! For those who don't know, those are the visual letters and numbers that many websites have for security. Screen readers can't read those, and few sites have an audio or other accessible alternative. That's a small thing, but it can keep otherwise fully efficient blind people from moving forward on a variety of projects independently. And those are just the things I've found as a working blind person who has her education behind her. When I was in college and grad school, I used readers even more than now. For example, STEM accessibility is still sporadic at best, so having a reader available in those areas is helpful. This is also sometimes true for foreign language classes. In my education classes, there was a lot of art work to be done. I had to create bulletin boards, board games, graphic organizers, and other items that had to be done non-electronically and with a good deal of artistic visual detail. I imagine there could be alternative techniques for doing these tasks without a reader, and I invented many of them, but overall I appreciated having a reader to work on these projects with. I'm giving these examples, not because I think you need convincing, but because they may be helpful to you when trying to convince teachers and other administrators about the importance of reader education. 

Personally, I learned a lot of what I know about readers today from my time at the Louisiana Center for the Blind's college prep program and from reading articles and list posts from NFB members. The rest I learned from trial and error in my own life experience. I love the idea of a middle or high school student getting reader management education, and I look forward to hearing how your experience goes with that. 

Best of luck with the process, and feel free to write me if you have any other questions about reader use.

Best,
Allison








-----Original Message-----
From: blindkid [mailto:blindkid-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of DrV via blindkid
Sent: Sunday, August 23, 2015 11:39 PM
To: Blind Kid Mailing List, (for parents of blind children)
Cc: DrV
Subject: [blindkid] Readers in Middle & High School

Hi Again,
For those of you with reader experience for you middle & high school kids; can you describe the logistics? Are most volunteers? Do you pay for then; does the school district? What is the going rate for a paid reader?
I'm trying to get a sense of the spectrum.
Thanks
Eric
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