USING READERS ON THE JOB
                                  by Adrienne Asch

     From the Associate Editor: Adrienne Asch is a bioethicist who is completing her
Ph.D. She lives in New York City and is an active member of the Human Services
Division of the National Federation of the Blind. This article is reprinted from the
Spring-Summer, 1991, issue of the newsletter of the Human Services Division of the
National Federation of the Blind. For twenty years Ms. Asch has supervised readers in
complex and demanding professional projects and coordinated their work with her own
efficient use of technology. Her expertise is carefully and intelligently come by.
Here is what she has to say:

     You may already have developed techniques for effectively recruiting, training,
and working with readers. If, however, you haven't been happy with your work with
readers, or if you haven't used them in a job setting, perhaps some of the ideas here
will be useful to you.
     I've worked with readers in several different kinds of jobs and have developed
very satisfying and productive working relationships with many of them. Actually, the
people I hire as readers do quite a number of tasks, i.e., reading, of course, but
also organizing and sorting mail, filing, proofreading, and myriad other tasks. When
I advertise, I make clear that the largest part of the job is recording of
professional material but that it also includes miscellaneous administrative and
clerical tasks. I specify that the person must be versatile and reliable. He or she
must also be able to follow directions exactly and to work either independently or
under close supervision. I also specify the number of hours I want and the rate of
pay, which at the moment is seven dollars an hour--comparable with other part-time
jobs for college students in the New York area.
     Whether or not an employer pays part or all of my reader costs, I insist that I
must select, train, and supervise the reader. For any potential reader I conduct a
short telephone interview and a two-hour in-person interview, during which I take the
reader through a good sample of what he or she would be doing. I get an idea of how
carefully someone reads text, footnotes, tables, and so forth; whether the person can
quickly find the third paragraph on a page, the fourth chapter in a book, the
bibliographic information needed for citing an article, or a letter dated July 9,
1988, in a case file containing several dozen documents. Although I believe it is my
job to know what I'm looking for in a book or case file, I must work with someone who
can follow clear instructions. If my reader is likely to need to interact with my
superiors, colleagues, and support staff, I make sure that those others get some
opportunity to meet with candidates during the interviewing process. (If, for
example, readers are going to proofread what an office secretary has typed from my
drafts, it is important that the reader and secretary have an amicable and
professional relationship.)

Getting the Job Done

     Depending on what you will have your readers do, you may want to prepare some
training materials for them about how you want things read, filed, and the like. As
soon as I select a reader, I give them something I've prepared about my filing system
and about how I want things read to me or, more often, to the tape recorder. Some
portion of reading time includes interaction between the reader and me about what
needs to be done and in what order. If I have a desk piled high with mail, which is
common, usually our first task is sorting what needs to be attended to quickly, what
can wait, and what is junk and is going to be thrown out summarily. Anything I'm not
going to attend to immediately or anything that I think I'll need to find myself, I
try to label in Braille. Actually, the mail is the main thing that a reader and I do
together. After I give directions, most filing, photocopying, article-reading, and
proofreading can be done by the reader without my presence. I prefer to be flexible
in the way I work and do not like having a reader schedule unduly control the rest of
my work life. By setting things up so that readers can do a lot of work on their own,
I remain available to colleagues, unexpected phone calls, or meetings. I can also
accommodate my own rhythms of completing important writing or reading I'm doing
instead of stopping because a reader has arrived.

Why I Use the Tape Recorder 

     Retaining such flexibility requires that I be organized about what I want
accomplished by a given time, hiring people who can work well on their own, and that
readers put a lot of material on tape for me to deal with later. I have found this
arrangement by far the most suitable and convenient for me. Whenever I think there is
any chance I will need to keep something I'm reading (whether it's an article, a long
memo, a complicated letter, or material about a patient or student written by another
professional), I have the reader tape it. I do this for many reasons. First of all,
it means that I don't waste the reader's time in taking notes as I'm first hearing
the material. The reader can use all the time in recording, and I can then read at my
convenience, speeding up, going back, taking notes as I go. Also, I have discovered
that on the first reading, however carefully I take notes, there are things I miss.
Two months or years later I may realize that there was something important in a
document that I didn't originally note down. If the complete document is on tape, I
don't have to waste any more reader time in finding and reading it again.
     Another virtue of having things taped is that the reader is not then skimming a
document, trying to decide what is important. Eventually you and your reader will
know what, if anything, can be skipped, but be very careful about skipping things or
letting a reader decide what can be omitted. Sometimes a file full of letters from
the same person will suddenly show a new address or phone number that you discover
you need. If all these things are on tape, you can decide what to skip on first
reading yourself, and if you later realize you need something, you can go back to
find it.
     Obviously, when a tape is likely to contain a great deal of material, I make a
Braille list of what is on each tape and organize the tapes in a way that makes it
easy for me to find the particular tape and section I need. I use the RFB method of
tone-indexing: once for each page and twice for each new document, section, or
chapter.

The Reading Relationship

     Good readers are indispensable, but good reading relationships, like any other
relationships, take work. I think it's very good for readers to understand that,
while you are in charge, they are doing a valuable and responsible job in which they
should take pride. Working on their own means that they can organize their work to
take breaks, to change tasks, or to decide the order of tasks, as long as things are
completed on the schedule you specify. Although I work with three or four readers
every week, I try to organize work so that particular readers have particular tasks.
For example, one reader, who is good at it and likes doing it, goes through bills,
organizes my tax records to take to my accountant, and so forth. Another may read all
the material on a given subject or about a given case. Yet a third might do all the
work to assist me to get a particular course syllabus in shape, make all the
revisions to my resume, or work on all the revisions and multiple drafts of an
article I'm preparing. This gives the reader a sense of involvement in a particular
project by seeing how the work in one session affects what happens next.
     Even readers who do a lot of work on their own deserve to know that what they do
is valued and that their doing it well is appreciated. They also need to know that
their honest mistakes can be tolerated. It is all too easy for a new reader to record
on the wrong speed, to forget to indicate page numbers, or even to change tracks or
tapes incorrectly. You don't need to tolerate carelessness, but sometimes even the
most careful people make errors.
     Having the reader work independently preserves my flexibility and my
separateness as a professional. The reader can be recording while I converse with
colleagues, take a coffee break, make a phone call, write a letter, or do an errand.
This set-up also helps make it clear to everyone with whom I work that my reader and
I are not inseparable, and that I'm the one in charge. If I must bring a reader with
me to review records that cannot be taken out of a particular setting, I make it
clear to the people at that setting that they must deal with and speak to me and not
to my reader and that my reader is not an intermediary. I try not to take a reader
into such a situation until we have established the kind of relationship in which
it's understood between us how to deal with such annoying occurrences.
     I've worked with more than a hundred readers over the past twenty years. Some
have worked with me for twenty to thirty hours a week for months or years. Each time
I have to say good-by to someone I've enjoyed, who has gotten to know my work, my
personality, and quirks, and who can take just the right amount of initiative to
remind me that I haven't answered a letter or decided what to do about some piece of
mail, I wonder how I'll ever train someone else to do as well. Sometimes a departing
reader helps train his or her successor, which is often quite valuable. But I have
discovered that being clear about what I want means that I usually can get new
readers who will work well and whom I will enjoy. They will be different, of course,
and we will develop our own set of jokes and shorthand. One of the things that
gratify me is that no matter how much they and I understand that they enable me to do
my work, they have always seen me as the person doing the work; they bring their
intelligence, personality, and sense of commitment to the job; often they have ideas
and suggestions that improve the way in which I organize something or express
something, but they never see me as dependent upon them in a way that inspires
condescension. They know they help me get things done, but they often tell me that I
help them by showing them how to organize time to accomplish several projects and by
exposing them to ideas and fields they may not have known before. They also learn a
lot about the ins and outs of managing as a blind person, and I've been delighted to
discover that several of them have gone about debunking the nonsensical beliefs of
their friends and acquaintances about blindness. Readers can be allies in changing
negative attitudes about blindness, and that is a pleasurable by-product of working
with them.